Belief in Belief

Carl Sa­gan once told a parable of some­one who comes to us and claims: “There is a dragon in my garage.” Fas­ci­nat­ing! We re­ply that we wish to see this dragon—let us set out at once for the garage! “But wait,” the claimant says to us, “it is an in­visi­ble dragon.”

Now as Sa­gan points out, this doesn’t make the hy­poth­e­sis un­falsifi­able. Per­haps we go to the claimant’s garage, and al­though we see no dragon, we hear heavy breath­ing from no visi­ble source; foot­prints mys­te­ri­ously ap­pear on the ground; and in­stru­ments show that some­thing in the garage is con­sum­ing oxy­gen and breath­ing out car­bon diox­ide.

But now sup­pose that we say to the claimant, “Okay, we’ll visit the garage and see if we can hear heavy breath­ing,” and the claimant quickly says no, it’s an inaudible dragon. We pro­pose to mea­sure car­bon diox­ide in the air, and the claimant says the dragon does not breathe. We pro­pose to toss a bag of flour into the air to see if it out­lines an in­visi­ble dragon, and the claimant im­me­di­ately says, “The dragon is per­me­able to flour.”

Carl Sa­gan used this parable to illus­trate the clas­sic moral that poor hy­pothe­ses need to do fast foot­work to avoid falsifi­ca­tion. But I tell this parable to make a differ­ent point: The claimant must have an ac­cu­rate model of the situ­a­tion some­where in their mind, be­cause they can an­ti­ci­pate, in ad­vance, ex­actly which ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults they’ll need to ex­cuse.

Some philoso­phers have been much con­fused by such sce­nar­ios, ask­ing, “Does the claimant re­ally be­lieve there’s a dragon pre­sent, or not?” As if the hu­man brain only had enough disk space to rep­re­sent one be­lief at a time! Real minds are more tan­gled than that. There are differ­ent types of be­lief; not all be­liefs are di­rect an­ti­ci­pa­tions. The claimant clearly does not an­ti­ci­pate see­ing any­thing un­usual upon open­ing the garage door. Other­wise they wouldn’t make ad­vance ex­cuses. It may also be that the claimant’s pool of propo­si­tional be­liefs con­tains the free-float­ing state­ment There is a dragon in my garage. It may seem, to a ra­tio­nal­ist, that these two be­liefs should col­lide and con­flict even though they are of differ­ent types. Yet it is a phys­i­cal fact that you can write “The sky is green!” next to a pic­ture of a blue sky with­out the pa­per burst­ing into flames.

The ra­tio­nal­ist virtue of em­piri­cism is sup­posed to pre­vent us from mak­ing this class of mis­take. We’re sup­posed to con­stantly ask our be­liefs which ex­pe­riences they pre­dict, make them pay rent in an­ti­ci­pa­tion. But the dragon-claimant’s prob­lem runs deeper, and can­not be cured with such sim­ple ad­vice. It’s not ex­actly difficult to con­nect be­lief in a dragon to an­ti­ci­pated ex­pe­rience of the garage. If you be­lieve there’s a dragon in your garage, then you can ex­pect to open up the door and see a dragon. If you don’t see a dragon, then that means there’s no dragon in your garage. This is pretty straight­for­ward. You can even try it with your own garage.

No, this in­visi­bil­ity busi­ness is a symp­tom of some­thing much worse.

Depend­ing on how your child­hood went, you may re­mem­ber a time pe­riod when you first be­gan to doubt Santa Claus’s ex­is­tence, but you still be­lieved that you were sup­posed to be­lieve in Santa Claus, so you tried to deny the doubts. As Daniel Den­nett ob­serves, where it is difficult to be­lieve a thing, it is of­ten much eas­ier to be­lieve that you ought to be­lieve it. What does it mean to be­lieve that the Ul­ti­mate Cos­mic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green? The state­ment is con­fus­ing; it’s not even clear what it would mean to be­lieve it—what ex­actly would be be­lieved, if you be­lieved. You can much more eas­ily be­lieve that it is proper, that it is good and vir­tu­ous and benefi­cial, to be­lieve that the Ul­ti­mate Cos­mic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green. Den­nett calls this “be­lief in be­lief.”1

And here things be­come com­pli­cated, as hu­man minds are wont to do—I think even Den­nett over­sim­plifies how this psy­chol­ogy works in prac­tice. For one thing, if you be­lieve in be­lief, you can­not ad­mit to your­self that you merely be­lieve in be­lief. What’s vir­tu­ous is to be­lieve, not to be­lieve in be­liev­ing; and so if you only be­lieve in be­lief, in­stead of be­liev­ing, you are not vir­tu­ous. No­body will ad­mit to them­selves, “I don’t be­lieve the Ul­ti­mate Cos­mic Sky is blue and green, but I be­lieve I ought to be­lieve it”—not un­less they are un­usu­ally ca­pa­ble of ac­knowl­edg­ing their own lack of virtue. Peo­ple don’t be­lieve in be­lief in be­lief, they just be­lieve in be­lief.

(Those who find this con­fus­ing may find it helpful to study math­e­mat­i­cal logic, which trains one to make very sharp dis­tinc­tions be­tween the propo­si­tion P, a proof of P, and a proof that P is prov­able. There are similarly sharp dis­tinc­tions be­tween P, want­ing P, be­liev­ing P, want­ing to be­lieve P, and be­liev­ing that you be­lieve P.)

There are differ­ent kinds of be­lief in be­lief. You may be­lieve in be­lief ex­plic­itly; you may re­cite in your de­liber­ate stream of con­scious­ness the ver­bal sen­tence “It is vir­tu­ous to be­lieve that the Ul­ti­mate Cos­mic Sky is perfectly blue and perfectly green.” (While also be­liev­ing that you be­lieve this, un­less you are un­usu­ally ca­pa­ble of ac­knowl­edg­ing your own lack of virtue.) But there are also less ex­plicit forms of be­lief in be­lief. Maybe the dragon-claimant fears the pub­lic ridicule that they imag­ine will re­sult if they pub­li­cly con­fess they were wrong.2 Maybe the dragon-claimant flinches away from the prospect of ad­mit­ting to them­selves that there is no dragon, be­cause it con­flicts with their self-image as the glo­ri­ous dis­cov­erer of the dragon, who saw in their garage what all oth­ers had failed to see.

If all our thoughts were de­liber­ate ver­bal sen­tences like philoso­phers ma­nipu­late, the hu­man mind would be a great deal eas­ier for hu­mans to un­der­stand. Fleet­ing men­tal images, un­spo­ken flinches, de­sires acted upon with­out ac­knowl­edge­ment—these ac­count for as much of our­selves as words.

While I dis­agree with Den­nett on some de­tails and com­pli­ca­tions, I still think that Den­nett’s no­tion of be­lief in be­lief is the key in­sight nec­es­sary to un­der­stand the dragon-claimant. But we need a wider con­cept of be­lief, not limited to ver­bal sen­tences. “Belief” should in­clude un­spo­ken an­ti­ci­pa­tion-con­trol­lers. “Belief in be­lief” should in­clude un­spo­ken cog­ni­tive-be­hav­ior-guiders. It is not psy­cholog­i­cally re­al­is­tic to say, “The dragon-claimant does not be­lieve there is a dragon in their garage; they be­lieve it is benefi­cial to be­lieve there is a dragon in their garage.” But it is re­al­is­tic to say the dragon-claimant an­ti­ci­pates as if there is no dragon in their garage, and makes ex­cuses as if they be­lieved in the be­lief.

You can pos­sess an or­di­nary men­tal pic­ture of your garage, with no drag­ons in it, which cor­rectly pre­dicts your ex­pe­riences on open­ing the door, and never once think the ver­bal phrase There is no dragon in my garage. I even bet it’s hap­pened to you—that when you open your garage door or bed­room door or what­ever, and ex­pect to see no drag­ons, no such ver­bal phrase runs through your mind.

And to flinch away from giv­ing up your be­lief in the dragon—or flinch away from giv­ing up your self-image as a per­son who be­lieves in the dragon—it is not nec­es­sary to ex­plic­itly think I want to be­lieve there’s a dragon in my garage. It is only nec­es­sary to flinch away from the prospect of ad­mit­ting you don’t be­lieve.

If some­one be­lieves in their be­lief in the dragon, and also be­lieves in the dragon, the prob­lem is much less se­vere. They will be will­ing to stick their neck out on ex­per­i­men­tal pre­dic­tions, and per­haps even agree to give up the be­lief if the ex­per­i­men­tal pre­dic­tion is wrong.3 But when some­one makes up ex­cuses in ad­vance, it would seem to re­quire that be­lief and be­lief in be­lief have be­come un­syn­chro­nized.

This post helps me un­der­stand some of the most in­furi­at­ing phrases I ever hear (which the ti­tle im­me­di­ately re­minded me of): “it doesn’t mat­ter what you be­lieve as long as you be­lieve some­thing”, “ev­ery­one has to be­lieve in some­thing”, “faith is a virtue”, &c. It makes sense that if a per­son’s sec­ond-or­der be­lief is stronger than their first-or­der be­lief, they would say things like that.

One of our neigh­bors in Tisvilde once fixed a horse­shoe over the door to his house. When a mu­tual ac­quain­tance asked him, ‘But are you re­ally su­per­sti­tious? Do you hon­estly be­lieve that this horse­shoe will bring you luck?’ he replied, ‘Of course not; but they say it helps even if you don’t be­lieve it.’

— Niels Bohr

(Note: This is of­ten re­told with Bohr him­self as the one with the horse­shoe, but this quote ap­pears to be the au­then­tic one.)

I won­der how com­mon that is, be­liev­ing that you don’t be­lieve some­thing but act­ing in a way that im­plies more be­lief in it than you ac­knowl­edge. One other ex­am­ple I ex­pe­rienced re­cently: For what­ever rea­son, my mom had a home­o­pathic cold rem­edy ly­ing around. (I think a friend gave it to her.) She and I both had colds re­cently, so she sug­gested I try some of it. The thing is, she gives full as­sent to my ex­pla­na­tions of why home­opa­thy is both ex­per­i­men­tally falsified and phys­i­cal non­sense; she even ap­peared to be­lieve me when I looked at the in­gre­di­ents and dilu­tion fac­tors and de­ter­mined that the bot­tle es­sen­tially con­tained wa­ter, sugar, and pur­ple food colour­ing. But even af­ter that, she still said we may as well try it be­cause it couldn’t hurt. True, it couldn’t hurt… but “it can’t hurt” doesn’t sound like re­ally un­der­stand­ing that the bot­tle you’re hold­ing con­sists of wa­ter, sugar, and pur­ple.

Another in­stance may be former the­ists who still act in some ways as though they be­lieve in God (an in­ter­est­ing mir­ror image of cur­rent the­ists who don’t act as though they re­ally be­lieve what they pro­fess to be­lieve), though in my ex­pe­rience many of them con­sider it to be bad habit they’re try­ing to break, so I’d be less in­clined to call it be­lief in [dis]be­lief, I’d take that as some­thing more akin to akra­sia.

I once took cough drops that re­ally helped with the sore throat from a cold I had, and ac­tu­ally tasted good too. It was only af­ter a day or two that I looked at the pack­ag­ing and re­al­ized they were home­o­pathic. I didn’t think too hard about it and kept tak­ing them, be­cause I wanted the placebo benefits and all the other brands of cough drop I own taste ter­rible.

I agree this study is a bit silly. I’ll try to dig up the one I saw, but promise noth­ing.

Agree that the placebo effect may con­tain ly­ing to doc­tors. There may also be some re­gres­sion to the mean—peo­ple who are too healthy are ex­cluded from the study, so when ev­ery­one moves at ran­dom the ones sick enough to be se­lected get healthier.

My un­der­stand­ing is that the stud­ies es­tab­lish­ing a placebo effect were con­trol­led in a way that’d rule out re­gres­sion to the mean as a cause of the per­ceived im­prove­ments. Ly­ing to doc­tors does sound plau­si­ble, though.

What’s weird about this is that if this the­ory works, any­thing forms an ac­cept­able sub­sti­tute.

So you don’t need to buy any ac­tual home­o­pathic “med­i­ca­tion”, you can save lots of money by just eat­ing some sugar. (The home­o­pathic markup on sugar is just un­be­liev­able.)

Even sugar isn’t nec­es­sary, since you’re stipu­lat­ing that “what works” isn’t any par­tic­u­lar mechanism of ac­tion but just the ac­tion of treat­ing your­self. You could as well choose to be­lieve that tak­ing a deep breath three times in suc­ces­sion is a good rem­edy against the cold (or what­ever else ails you).

A rough­ness in the throat is usu­ally the first thing I no­tice. Unchecked, it de­vel­ops into a cough, sore throat, sneez­ing, and at the peak a cou­ple of days of be­ing com­pletely un­able to func­tion.

This hap­pened about once a year on av­er­age be­fore I dis­cov­ered I could ban­ish them by willpower, since when it’s been more like once in five years, gen­er­ally from ex­treme cir­cum­stances like be­ing caught in the rain on a bike ride with­out ad­e­quate cloth­ing.

Just to chuck in a lit­tle more anec­do­tal ev­i­dence, my hus­band ap­plied this be­lief in the placebo effect, and so long as he can get an early night, he never suffers the lit­tle bugs and headaches.

I like Eliezer’s es­say on be­lief very much.
I’ve been think­ing about the role of be­lief in re­li­gion. (For the sake of full dis­clo­sure, my back­ground is Calv­inist.) I won­der why Chris­ti­ans say, “We be­lieve in one God,” as if that were a par­tic­u­larly strong as­ser­tion. Wouldn’t it be stronger to say, “We know one God?” What is the differ­ence be­tween be­lief and knowl­edge? It seems to me that be­liefs are usu­ally based on no data. Most peo­ple who be­lieve in a god do so in pre­cisely the same way that they might be­lieve in a dragon in the garage. Peo­ple are com­fortable say­ing that they know some­thing only when they can re­fer to sup­port­ing data. Believ­ers are vali­antly cling­ing to con­cepts for which the data is ab­sent. Most peo­ple who be­lieve in a god do so in pre­cisely the same way that they might be­lieve in a dragon in the garage.

Re­gard­ing the di­alogue be­tween the dragon claimant and his challengers, why didn’t the challengers sim­ply ask the claimant, “Why do you say that there is an in­visi­ble, inaudible, non-respiri­at­ing, flour-per­me­able dragon in your garage?”

At least in my mind, the pro­cesses that gen­er­ate be­liefs like “my keys are in my left pocket” are not perfectly re­li­able—at least once, I have thought my keys were in my left pocket when in fact I left them on the dresser.

So #3 is demon­stra­bly false for me; on this ac­count, I don’t know where my keys are.

Which is perfectly in­ter­nally con­sis­tent, though it doesn’t match up with the col­lo­quial us­age of “to know,” which seems to in­di­cate that the speaker’s con­fi­dence in p is above some thresh­old.

There’s noth­ing wrong with hav­ing pre­cisely defined terms of art, in episte­mol­ogy or any other field. But it can lead to con­fu­sion when col­lo­quial words are re­pur­posed in this way.

Your ques­tion is more helpful, of course. Any per­son who be­lieves that there is a non-ev­i­den­tiary dragon in a garage will have some way to an­swer mine, hope­fully with­out go­ing through too much more stress.

While I dis­agree with Den­nett on some de­tails and com­pli­ca­tions, I still think that Den­nett’s no­tion of be­lief in be­lief is the key in­sight nec­es­sary to un­der­stand the dragon-claimant. But we need a wider con­cept of be­lief, not limited to ver­bal sen­tences.

If you’ve read Den­nett on be­liefs, you’ll ap­pre­ci­ate that this “wider con­cept” based on be­hav­ior and pre­dictabil­ity is re­ally at the heart of things.

I think it is very difficult to at­tribute a be­lief in drag­ons to this “dragon-be­liever”. Only a small sub­set of his ac­tions—those in­volv­ing ver­bal avowals—make sense if you at­tribute a be­lief in drag­ons to him. There is a con­flict with the re­main­der of his be­liefs, as can be seen when he non­cha­lantly en­ters his garage, or con­fab­u­lates all sorts of rea­sons why his dragon can’t be demon­strated.

But as you have shown, ev­ery­thing makes sense if you at­tribute a re­lated, but slightly differ­ent be­lief, namely “I should avow a gen­uine, heart­felt be­lief in drag­ons”. Per­haps we can say that this man (and the re­li­gious man, since this is the real point) doesn’t just be­lieve in be­lief, but they be­lieve that they be­lieve. He tries to make a sec­ond-or­der be­lief do the work of a first-or­der be­lief.

Anna,
If you’re talk­ing about real drag­ons, the the­ory that made the most in­tu­itive sense to me (I think I read it in an E.O. Wil­son writ­ing?) is that drag­ons are an amalga­ma­tion of things we’ve been nat­u­rally se­lected to biolog­i­cally fear: snakes and birds of prey (I think rats may have also been part of the list). Dragons don’t in­cor­po­rate an el­e­ment of them that looks like a hand­gun or a piping hot elec­tric stove, prob­a­bly be­cause they’re too new as threats for us to be nat­u­rally se­lected to fear things with those prop­er­ties.

Wow. So, I’m ba­si­cally brand new to this site. I’ve never taken a logic class and I’ve never read ex­ten­sively on the sub­jects dis­cussed here. So if I say some­thing un­bear­ably un­so­phis­ti­cated or naive, please di­rect me some­where use­ful. But I do have a cou­ple com­ments/​ques­tions about this post and some of the replies.

I don’t think it’s fair to com­pletely dis­count prayer. When I was a young child, I asked my grand­mother why I should bother pray­ing, when God sup­pos­edly loved ev­ery­one the same and peo­ple pray­ing for much more im­por­tant things didn’t get what they wanted all the time.

She told me that the idea is not to pray for things to hap­pen or not hap­pen. If I pray for my bas­ket­ball team to win our game (or for my son to get well, or to win the lot­tery, or what­ever) then based on how I in­ter­pret the re­sults of my prayer I would be hold­ing God ac­countable for me get­ting or not get­ting what I wanted. The point of pray­ing, as she ex­plained it, was to de­velop a re­la­tion­ship with God so I would be able to han­dle what­ever situ­a­tion I found my­self in with grace. Even though we of­ten struc­ture our prayers as re­quests for things to hap­pen, the im­por­tant thing to keep in mind was how Je­sus prayed in the gar­den be­fore he was cru­ci­fied. Even though he was scared of what was go­ing to hap­pen to him and he didn’t want to go through with it, his prayer was “your will, not mine”. He didn’t pray for things to go his way, al­though he ac­knowl­edged in his prayers that he did have cer­tain things that he wanted. The point of the prayer was not to avoid tri­als or fix their out­come, but to com­mu­ni­cate with God for the strength and courage to hold fast to faith through tri­als.

Now, I’m cer­tainly not cit­ing my grand­mother as a re­li­gious or the­olog­i­cal ex­pert. But that ex­pla­na­tion made sense to me at the time, par­tially be­cause I think you could prob­a­bly that it would have the same benefit for peo­ple re­gard­less of whether or not there was ac­tu­ally a God to cor­re­spond to the prayers, which jives well with how I be­lieve in God.

Maybe I’m mi­s­un­der­stand­ing the post, but I think I have some­thing like be­liev­ing that I ought to be­lieve in God, al­though I’ve always phrased it as choos­ing to be­lieve in God. Even though I was raised Catholic, I never felt like I re­ally “be­lieved” it. For as long as I can re­mem­ber, the idea of “be­lief” has made me in­cred­ible un­com­fortable. Every time a TV show char­ac­ter asked “didn’t you ever just be­lieve some­thing” I would cringe and won­der how any­one could pos­si­bly find such an ex­pe­rience valid when any­one else could have an al­ter­nate ex­pe­rience.

Se­cretly, I’m glad that I’ve never felt any kind of re­li­gious con­vic­tion. If I did, then I would have to prize my sub­jec­tive ex­pe­rience over some­one else’s sub­jec­tive ex­pe­rience. I’m quite aware that there are a mul­ti­tude of peo­ple that have had very profound ex­pe­riences that make them be­lieve in one doc­trine or an­other to the ex­clu­sion of all oth­ers, and that’s some­thing I can’t re­ally un­der­stand. Know­ing that other peo­ple ex­ist that feel equal con­vic­tion about differ­ent ideas of God with the same ob­jec­tive ev­i­dence makes it im­pos­si­ble for me to have any sort of be­lief in a spe­cific God or scrip­ture, at least at the level of some­one who be­lieves with enough con­vic­tion not to be perfectly com­fortable with the idea that I’m wrong.

That said, I con­sider my­self Catholic. I don’t agree with all the doc­trine and I don’t think I could hon­estly say I think my re­li­gion is cor­rect and other re­li­gions are wrong in any way that cor­re­sponds to an ob­jec­tive re­al­ity. But I choose to be­lieve in this re­li­gion be­cause what I do re­ally be­lieve deep down is that there is some higher or­der that gives mean­ingful­ness to hu­man life.

I con­sider it to be rather like the way I love my fam­ily- I don’t ob­jec­tively think that my fam­ily is the best fam­ily in the world, the par­tic­u­lar sub­set of peo­ple most de­serv­ing of my love and af­fec­tion. But they’re my fam­ily, and I’ll have no other. I can love them while still ac­knowl­edg­ing that your love for your fam­ily is just as real as mine. Just be­cause they’re differ­ent ex­pe­riences doesn’t make them more or less valid- and just be­cause it isn’t tan­gible or falsifi­able doesn’t make it any less po­tent. Even so, I’m always cu­ri­ous if I’m re­ally an athe­ist, or maybe an ag­nos­tic, since I don’t re­ally be­lieve it be­yond my con­scious choice to be­lieve it (and a bit of emo­tional at­tach­ment to my per­sonal his­tory with this spe­cific re­li­gion).

Whew. That was a lot of words. Any­ways, I’m sure that I’ve got plenty of log­i­cal and ra­tio­nal flaws and holes. Like I said, I’m ba­si­cally brand new to all the ideas pre­sented here, so I’m go­ing to try and thrash my way through them and see what be­liefs I still hold at the end.

Hi there, nice to know I’m not the only one ab­solutely new and quak­ing in my slip­pers here.

I don’t think you’re quite mak­ing the mis­take of be­liev­ing in be­lief. I can’t model your brain ac­cu­rately just by read­ing a few para­graphs of course, but you don’t seem to show much flinch­ing-away from ad­mit­ting the judeo-chris­tian god and the catholic in­ter­pre­ta­tion of it is wrong. I think you’re more iden­ti­fy­ing the re­li­gion of your fam­ily and peers as your ‘group’ (tribe, na­tion, what­ever word­ing you pre­fer) and shy­ing away from drop­ping it as part of your iden­tity for the same rea­son a strong pa­triot would hate the feel­ing of be­tray­ing their coun­try.

I re­mem­ber read­ing a thing about this by… some fa­mous sec­u­larist writer, Dawk­ins or Har­ris I think. About a mil­lion years ago, for all the good my mem­ory is serv­ing me on the mat­ter. I’ll try and find it for you.

As for be­ing at­tracted to a higher or­der of things, well.. I agree with you. I just hap­pen to think that higher or­der is quite phys­i­cal in na­ture, hid­den from us by the mun­dan­ity of its ap­pear­ance. I think you might re­ally want to read the se­quences:

At least in the case of re­li­gious peo­ple who are ac­tu­ally con­vinced God ex­ists, I think the differ­ence be­tween be­lief and knowl­edge is thus:
Belief is when you think some­thing is true but it’s con­tro­ver­sial.
Knowl­edge is when you think somet­ing is true and think ev­ery­one would agree with you.

I no­ticed that I was con­fused by your dragon anal­ogy. 1) Why did this guy be­lieve in this dragon when there was ab­solutely no ev­i­dence that it ex­ists? 2) Why do I find the anal­ogy so satis­fy­ing, when its premise is so ab­surd.

Ob­ser­va­tion 1) Reli­gious peo­ple have ev­i­dence:

The thing about re­li­gion is that a given re­li­gion’s effects on peo­ple tend to be pre­dictable. When Chris­ti­ans tell you to ac­cept Je­sus into your heart, some of the less effec­tive mis­sion­ar­ies talk about heaven, but the bet­ter ones talk about pos­i­tive changes to their emo­tional states. Often, they will im­ply that those pos­i­tive life changes will hap­pen for you if you join, and as a pre­dic­tion that tends to be a very good one.

As a ra­tio­nal­ist, I know the emo­tional benefits of pay­ing at­ten­tion when some­thing nice hap­pens, and I rec­og­nize that feel­ing grat­i­tude boosts my al­tru­ism. I know I can get high on hy­poxia if I ever want to see vi­sions or speak in tongues. I know that spend­ing at least an hour ev­ery week build­ing eth­i­cal re­sponses into my cached be­hav­ior is a good prac­tice for keep­ing pos­i­tive peo­ple in my life. I rec­og­nize the his­tor­i­cal ed­ifice of moral­ity that al­lowed us to build the so­ciety we cur­rently live in. This whole suite of tools is built into re­li­gion, and the means of achiev­ing the benefits it pro­vides is non-ob­vi­ous enough that a mys­ti­cal ex­pla­na­tion makes sense. Ques­tion­ing those be­liefs with­out that ad­di­tional knowl­edge means you lose ac­cess to the benefits of the be­liefs.

Ob­ser­va­tion 2) We ex­pect peo­ple to dis­card falsifi­able parts of their be­liefs with­out dis­card­ing all of that be­lief.

The dragon anal­ogy is nice and un­com­pli­cated. There are no benefits to be­liev­ing in the dragon, so the per­son in the anal­ogy can make no pre­dic­tions with it. I’ve never seen that hap­pen in the real world. Usu­ally re­li­gious peo­ple have tested their be­liefs, and found that the pre­dic­tions they’ve made come true. The fact that those be­liefs can’t pre­dict things in cer­tain ar­eas doesn’t change the fact that they do work in oth­ers, and most peo­ple don’t ex­pect gen­er­al­ity from their be­liefs. When that guy says that the dragon is per­me­able to flour, that isn’t him mak­ing an ex­cuse for the lack of a dragon. That’s him in­di­cat­ing a sec­tion of re­al­ity where he doesn’t use the dragon to in­form his de­ci­sions. Reli­gious peo­ple don’t ap­ply their be­lief in their dragon in cat­e­gories where be­liev­ing has not pro­vided them with pos­i­tive re­sults. Disproved hy­pothe­ses don’t dis­prove the be­lief, but rather dis­prove the be­lief for that cat­e­gory of ex­pe­rience. And that’s pretty nor­mal. The fact that I don’t know ev­ery­thing, and the fact that I can be right about some things and wrong about oth­ers means that I pretty much have to be cat­e­go­riz­ing my knowl­edge.

Think­ing about this ar­ti­cle has lead me to the con­clu­sion that “be­lief in be­lief” is more ac­cu­rately vi­su­al­ized as com­part­men­tal­iza­tion of be­lief, that it’s com­mon to ev­ery­one, and that it in­di­cates that a be­lief that I have is pro­vid­ing the right an­swer for the wrong rea­sons. I pre­dict that if I train my­self to re­act to pre­dict­ing that the world will be­have strangely in or­der to not vi­o­late my hy­poth­e­sis by say­ing out loud “this be­lief is not fully gen­eral” I will find that more of­ten than not that this state­ment will be cor­rect.

“Those who find this con­fus­ing may find it helpful to study math­e­mat­i­cal logic, which trains one to make very sharp dis­tinc­tions be­tween the propo­si­tion P, a proof of P, and a proof that P is prov­able”

This is a bit of a side ques­tion, but wouldn’t a proof that P is prov­able be a proof of P? In fact, it sounds like a par­tic­u­larly el­e­gant form of proof.

Se­conded—this is an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion. (And I sus­pect that there are some in­ter­est­ing cases in which a proof that P is prov­able does not con­sti­tute a proof, but this is mainly be­cause I’ve seen math­e­mat­i­ci­ans break similarly in­tu­itive propo­si­tions be­fore.)

I sus­pect that there are some in­ter­est­ing cases in which a proof that P is prov­able does not con­sti­tute a proof, but this is mainly be­cause I’ve seen math­e­mat­i­ci­ans break similarly in­tu­itive propo­si­tions be­fore.

It wouldn’t sur­prise me ei­ther. How­ever such cases would have to rely on a pre­cise defi­ni­tion of ‘proof’ differ­ently to what I use. The re­sult would then be filed un­der ‘fas­ci­nat­ing tech­ni­cal ex­am­ple’ but not un­der ‘startling rev­e­la­tion’ and I would take note of the jar­gon for use when talk­ing to other math­e­mat­i­ci­ans.

Here’s an ex­am­ple of what Doug Hofs­tadter writes in I Am A Strange Loop. Kurt Goedel dis­cov­ered that Prin­cipia Math­e­mat­ica by Ber­trand Rus­sell does provide refer­ence to it­self. So Rus­sell in his book yields the propo­si­tions and their proofs, and then Goedel as­signs spe­cific num­bers to proofs and there­fore proves that there is a proof that they are in fact, provable

Out­side of math­e­mat­ics, a state­ment that is prov­able is also dis­prov­able. Then it’s called a hy­poth­e­sis.

I’m re­minded of the joke where an en­g­ineer, a physi­cist, and a math­e­mat­i­cian are go­ing to a job in­ter­view. The in­ter­viewer has rigged a fire to start in the wastepa­per bas­ket, to see how they re­act in a crisis situ­a­tion. The en­g­ineer sees the fire, sees the wa­ter cooler, grabs the wa­ter cooler and dumps it on the fire. The physi­cist sees the fire, sees the wa­ter cooler, grabs pen­cil and pa­per, calcu­lates the ex­act amount of wa­ter needed to ex­tin­guish the fire, then pours that amount of wa­ter into the bas­ket, ex­actly ex­tin­guish­ing the fire. The math­e­mat­i­cian sees the fire, sees the wa­ter cooler, and says, “Ah! A solu­tion ex­ists!”.

Went back to re-read some La­can and Zizek af­ter this, with re­gards to Den­nett’s ‘be­lief in be­lief.’ Very similar to the ‘dis­placed be­lief’ they talk about. The com­mon ex­am­ple they give is Santa Claus: chil­dren prob­a­bly don’t be­lieve it but they say they do for the pre­sents, be­cause they un­der­stand that the adults ex­pect them to be­lieve, etc. The par­ents don’t be­lieve it but they con­tinue the ruse for the benefit of the chil­dren, other peo­ple’s chil­dren, or what­ever they tell them­selves. Thus peo­ple of­ten *do* ad­mit to them­selves that they don’t be­lieve but they say “but nonethe­less other peo­ple be­lieve.” They dis­place the be­lief onto some­one else, and they con­tinue go­ing through the mo­tions—and the ‘be­lief’ func­tions any­way. Even if no­body ac­tu­ally be­lieves, they be­lieve by proxy by trust­ing the ap­par­ent be­lief of those around them. Em­peror’s New Clothes comes to mind also.

″ No, this in­visi­bil­ity busi­ness is a symp­tom of some­thing much worse. ”

In­deed. If only it *were* as sim­ple as all that… There of­ten is some fun­da­men­tal Thing pre­vent­ing peo­ple from re­al­iza­tion of the truth and then act­ing in ac­cor­dance with that truth though. Often times their en­tire wor­ld­view would be shat­tered, and they just Can’t Have That—it is ide­olog­i­cal, in other words. Others know some­thing is char­latanism but they are the char­latan benefit­ing so they’ll keep mak­ing up rea­sons for why there re­ally is a dragon in their garage (maybe they are sel­l­ing mag­i­cal dragon breath for $100/​jar). Others use false be­liefs merely as a way to sig­nal pro­pa­ganda and at­tract fol­low­ers—they know it’s fak­ery but they don’t care about de­bat­ing in good faith to be­gin with.

Any­way I’m slowly mak­ing my way through these af­ter a re-read of your HP fan­fic. Just wanted to say that even if “what do I know and how do I know it” is the only thing my brain can hold on to it’s already been well worth it (al­though I did pound Bayes’ The­o­rem in there, too). Thanks!

My main take-away: There is a differ­ence be­tween con­scious and sub­con­scious. If you ac­cuse sb with “You do not be­lieve X” then you will get de­nial be­cause he con­sciously be­lieves it. The prob­lem is that he sub­con­si­cously does not be­lieve it and thus comes up with ex­cuses in ad­vance.

I’ve always thought that the idea of “be­liev­ing in” things was very cu­ri­ous. This is a very thought-pro­vok­ing ar­ti­cle. Every time I en­gage a de­bate about this sub­ject (the rele­vance or use­ful­ness of be­liefs) some­one is sure to say some­thing about be­liefs ex­ist­ing for the benefit of the be­liever. My feel­ing is that with most be­liefs and with most be­liev­ers, there is an in­ter­nal ac­knowl­edge­ment of the falsifi­ablity of their be­lief which is out­weighed by the per­cep­tion that some benefit is de­rived from the be­lief. What I in­ter­pret from this is that most be­liev­ers sub­tley ad­mit their own prac­tice of be­lief in be­lief. I also feel that even the idea of whether or not one be­lieves in be­liev­ing in be­lief can en­ter the mind of the mun­dane thinker at such an ad­mis­sion.

“There’s some­thing that makes be­liv­ing and knowl­edge quite differ­ent, and that’s truth which isn’t in­side one per­son head but out there, in re­al­ity.”

Ehm, let me ask you this: Are you 100% sure that the sun will come up to­mor­row?

All ev­i­dence points that way, yes. We have a fair idea of what is go­ing on yes. But that’s where the ball stops—we will never know with 100% cer­tainity.

When we stop ac­knowl­edg­ing that the sci­ence of to­mor­row may pro­duce ev­i­dence that will turn our whole world-view up­side down, is when Science be­comes Reli­gion.

I’m not say­ing that we need to start tak­ing mediums se­ri­ously and base our lifeal­ter­ing de­ci­sions on nu­merol­ogy. I’m merely say­ing that the things you take se­ri­ously to­day, the things you’d base your lifeal­ter­ing de­ci­sions on to­day may be falsified to­mor­row, re­deemed the week af­ter, only to be shot down again with the lat­est re­search come this time next year.

The ‘Truth’ may be out there, but it needs to be ap­p­ro­cached em­piri­cally with a clear un­der­stand­ing of the fact that even re­peated mea­sure­ments of the same thing will only ever give us cir­cum­stan­cial ev­i­dence that may be in­fluenced by our abil­ities to mea­sure and rea­son. I don’t think we ever posess true knowl­edge. In­stead we have be­liefs that can or can­not stand up to em­piri­cal scrutiny. Beliefs that must still be challenged on a reg­u­lar ba­sis, and ac­knowl­edged for what they are.

Anna:
Whether you call it sci­ence fic­tion, heuris­tics, over­com­ing bias, his­tory, a be­lief is a be­lief.
You can’t prove be­lief as it’s self-sub­jec­tive.
—That only makes for more of a rea­son it should only be self af­fect­ing, too many peo­ple try to in­fluance the ac­tions of oth­ers bases on their dragons

You can’t tell some­one what they feel is wrong.
—Yes I can. “There’s a dragon in my bath­room”… (care­ful ex­am­i­na­tion of the bath­room)… “No, there isn’t, you’re wrong.”

Each in­di­vi­d­ual has there equa­tion when it comes to un­der­stand­ing the “dragon” within them­self.
—And it needs to be over­come with logic and rea­son.

If drag­ons can’t be ver­ified as they have never been ver­ified based on his­tory, why do peo­ple still feel the need to be­lieve in drag­ons and con­tinue to dis­cuss the sub­ject and be fas­ci­nated by it?
—sim­ply be­cause they were raised with it, taught to dis-be­live any ev­i­dence pro­vided, and been shown that those who dis­agree with it are ‘out to get them’

It’s an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion. Judg­ing by Eliezer Yud­kowsky’s story in Is That Your True Re­jec­tion?, they would be likely to say some­thing that sounded good even if it’s not their real rea­son.

Keep­ing in mind that the thought ex­er­cise has limited iso­mor­phism to be­lief in God. No one be­lieves in an in­visi­ble dragon in their garage … be­cause there isn’t any rea­son to think there is a dragon there. Theists have rea­sons to be­lieve in God, athe­ists just don’t agree with those rea­sons.

Main post “The claimant must have an ac­cu­rate model of the situ­a­tion some­where in his mind, be­cause he can an­ti­ci­pate, in ad­vance, ex­actly which ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults he’ll need to ex­cuse.”

I know this is a bit of a side is­sue, but how do you jus­tify this claim from the ex­am­ple given? You don’t need such a model to give the an­swers he gives. Surely you once en­gaged in late-night un­der­grad­u­ate pseudo-in­tel­lec­tual dis­cus­sions where you held an ul­ti­mately un­ten­able view­point but still fended off such ques­tions on the fly?

Per­haps though this is just a prob­lem aris­ing from the rather sim­plis­tic metaphor. A drag­o­nista can pos­tu­late a dragon and then, as in your ex­am­ple, re­fute all challenges by sim­ply deny­ing all in­ter­ac­tions with the real world, al­though then of course he’s not re­ally say­ing any­thing at all.
The re­li­gion­ist has a much more difficult trick to perform. He can­not take the drag­o­nista’s line as his god must in­ter­act in some way with the world to have any mean­ing. He is faced with hav­ing to rec­on­cile the in­ter­ac­tions he needs from his god (e.g. re­sponses to prayer) with the ap­par­ent ab­sence of phys­i­cal ev­i­dence for them. This DOES re­quire the build­ing of the con­sis­tent frame­work you pro­pose, so that he can fend off new challenges with­out fal­ling into a trap which con­cedes the non-ex­is­tence of his god. The con­volu­tions ex­hibited by fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­ti­ans when try­ing to con­struct such a rec­on­cili­a­tion be­tween what they need to be­lieve and the con­trary evolu­tion­ary ev­i­dence are a bet­ter ex­am­ple of this.

Does the idea that it is a good thing to sub­ject our be­liefs (and even our be­lief in be­lief) to log­i­cal and an­a­lyt­i­cal scrutiny count as be­lief in it­self or is it so jus­tifi­able as to count as knowl­edge? If so, what is the jus­tifi­ca­tion?

I don’t think it does. Scru­ti­niz­ing your be­liefs is a corol­lary—it nat­u­rally fol­lows if you be­lieve that “Truth is good and valuable and its pur­suit is worth­while.” We value truth, we want our maps to match the ter­ri­tory, and so we scru­ti­nize our be­liefs. If any­thing needs to be jus­tified, it’s the value placed on truth and knowl­edge thereof.

And that’s ac­tu­ally an in­ter­est­ing prob­lem. Although my in­tu­ition shouts TRUTH IS GOOD, there’s not much I can say to prove that state­ment, out­side of “It’s use­ful to be able to make ac­cu­rate pre­dic­tions.” It seems like the good­ness of truth ought to be prov­able some way. But maybe it’s just a moral value that our (sub-)cul­ture hap­pens to hold par­tic­u­larly strongly? Per­haps some­one bet­ter versed than I am in the arts of ra­tio­nal­ity can give a bet­ter an­swer.

“Belief in be­lief” ex­ists as a phe­nomenon but is nei­ther nec­es­sary nor suffi­cient to ex­plain the claims of the Drag­o­nist (if I may name his es­poused meta­physics thus) in Sa­gan’s parable.

My most re­cent en­counter with some­one who be­lieved in be­lief was some­one who did not in ad­di­tion be­lieve. He had be­lieved once, but he lost his faith (in this case, in God, not drag­ons) and he wished he could have it back. He be­lieved in be­lief—that it was a good thing—but alas, he did not be­lieve.

In the above ar­ti­cle, Eliezer (if I may so call him) was in­vok­ing the con­cept of be­lief in be­lief to ex­plain some­thing—that is, it was a hy­poth­e­sis of a sort. The phe­nomenon in ques­tion was this Drag­o­nist who claimed to be­lieve but gave some ev­i­dence that he did not in that he re­jected the most ob­vi­ous con­se­quences of a dragon be­ing in the garage. Our hy­poth­e­sis was that he didn’t re­ally be­lieve but thought he should and was, in effect, try­ing to con­vince him­self and oth­ers that it was so but (in the case of him­self) not so overtly that he’d have to ad­mit to him­self he wasn’t how he hoped he’d be.
If our hy­poth­e­sis were true, what would we an­ti­ci­pate? If we con­fronted this guy, that he’d break down and ad­mit he lack of be­lief? Some­one whose be­lief sys­tem runs to in­visi­ble drag­ons is too crazy to let that hap­pen so eas­ily. Maybe what we an­ti­ci­pate is that given suffi­cient anti-psy­chotic meds and as­so­ci­ated treat­ments and time, he would re­cant? What if he didn’t? Would we so be­lieve in our hy­poth­e­sis that we would have faith that given in­finite time (say, the amount of time nec­es­sary to search all the in­te­gers un­til we iden­ti­fied the last twin prime or the first perfect num­ber that didn’t end in 6 or 8) he would re­cant in prin­ci­ple. Worse still, maybe he would re­cant to get us off his back but con­tinue to be­lieve in se­cret.

In short, since our Drag­o­nist’s sub­jec­tive men­tal state is in­visi­ble to us, even were we to sprin­kle flour over his head, we are ul­ti­mately forced to rely on faith that be­lief in be­lief is what is be­hind this phe­nomenon.

If his men­tal state is in­visi­ble to us, that means we can’t prove what his men­tal state is, but it should still be pos­si­ble to have ev­i­dence for his men­tal state and to know it to some de­gree of cer­tainty that isn’t 100%. Which is no differ­ent from what sci­ence does to “prove” any­thing else.

It would be difficult to say what this ev­i­dence would be. As one who has spent some time with peo­ple who would gen­er­ally be called de­luded, I can as­sure you that find­ing an un­der­stand­able ex­pla­na­tion for their delu­sions is non-triv­ial.

Very in­ter­est­ing. I have tran­shu­man­ist be­liefs that I claim to hold. My ac­tions im­ply that I be­lieve that I be­lieve, if I un­der­stand this prop­erly.

A prime ex­am­ple would be how I tend to my health. There are sim­ple ra­tio­nal steps I can take to in­crease my odds of liv­ing long enough to hit pay dirt. I take okay care of my­self, but could do bet­ter. Much bet­ter.

Cry­on­ics may be an­other ex­am­ple. More re­search is re­quired on my part, but a non-zero last stab is ar­guably bet­ter than noth­ing. I am not en­rol­led. It feels a bit like Pas­cal’s Wager to me. Per­haps it is a more valid form of the ar­gu­ment, though. Hop­ing for a sci­en­tific mir­a­cle seems es­sen­tially differ­ent than hop­ing for a mag­i­cal mir­a­cle. Scien­tific mir­a­cles abound. Ar­tifi­cial hearts, cochlear im­plants, un­der­stand­ing our ori­gins, pro­vid­ing suc­cor to im­bal­anced minds, the list goes on. Mag­i­cal mir­a­cles… not so much.

Heck, I could stop for­get­ting to floss daily! (There seem to be strong cor­rel­la­tions be­tween gum dis­ease and heart dis­ease).

I an­ti­ci­pate as if there will be no rad­i­cal life ex­ten­sion available within my life time, but I will ar­gue for the pos­si­bil­ity and even like­li­hood. Do I have this cor­rect as a type of be­lief in be­lief?

In both cases, you pro­fess “I should floss ev­ery day” and do not ac­tu­ally floss ev­ery day. If it’s be­lief in be­lief, you might not even ac­knowl­edge the in­con­gru­ence. If it’s merely akra­sia, you al­most cer­tainly will.

It can be even sim­pler than that. You can sincerely de­sire to change such that you floss ev­ery day, and ex­press that de­sire with your mouth, “I should floss ev­ery day,” and yet find your­self un­able to phys­i­cally es­tab­lish the new habit in your rou­tine. You know you should, and yet you have hu­man failings that pre­vent you from achiev­ing what you want. And yet, if you had a but­ton that said “Edit my mind such that I am com­pel­led to floss daily as part of my morn­ing rou­tine un­less in­ter­rupted by se­ri­ous emer­gency and not sim­ply by mere in­con­ve­nience or for­get­ful­ness,” they would be push­ing that but­ton.

On the other hand, I may or may not want to live for­ever, de­pend­ing on how Fun The­ory re­solves. I am more in­ter­ested in ac­cru­ing max­i­mum he­dons over my lifes­pan. Liv­ing to 2000 eat­ing gruel as an as­cetic and ac­cru­ing only 50 he­dons in those 2000 years is not a gain for me over an Elvis Presley style crash and burn in 50 years end­ing with 2000 he­dons. The only way you can tempt me into im­mor­tal­ity is a strong promise of mas­sive he­don pay­off, with enough of an ac­cel­er­a­tion curve to pave the way with tan­gible re­turns at each trade­off you’d have me make. I’m will­ing to eat healthier if you make the he­dons ac­crue as I do it, rather than only in­cre­men­tally af­ter the fact. If liv­ing in­creas­ingly longer re­quires sac­ri­fic­ing in­creas­ingly many he­dons, I’m go­ing to have to solve some es­ti­mate of in­te­grat­ing for he­dons per year over time to see how it pays out. And if I can’t see tan­gible re­turns on my efforts, I prob­a­bly won’t be will­ing to put in the work. A lo­cal max­i­mum feels satis­fy­ing if you can’t taste the curve to the higher lo­cal max­i­mum, and I’m not all that in­ter­ested in climb­ing down the hill while satis­fied.

Give me a sec­ond or­der deriva­tive I can feel in­creas­ing quickly, and I will climb down that hill though.

That’s helpful in­put, thanks. After read­ing the link and search­ing the wiki I sus­pect that it is more likely an akra­sia/​urges v. goals sort of thing based upon my re­ac­tion to notic­ing the in­con­sis­tency. I felt a need to bring my ac­tions in line with my pro­fessed be­liefs.

Sur­prised not to find Pas­cal’s wa­ger linked to this dis­cus­sion since he faced the same crisis of be­lief. It’s well known he chose to be­lieve be­cause of the enor­mous (inf?) re­wards if that turned out to be right, so he was ar­guably hedg­ing his bets.

It’s less well known that he un­der­stood it (co­erced be­lief for ex­pe­di­ency’s sake) to be some­thing that would be ob­vi­ous to om­ni­scient God, so it wasn’t enough to choose to be­lieve, but rather he ac­tu­ally Had To. To this end he hoped that prac­tice would make perfect and I think died wor­ry­ing about it. this is de­scribed in the Wikipe­dia ar­ti­cle in an eva­sive third per­son, but a philos­o­phy pod­cast I heard at­tributed the dilemma of in­sincere be­lief to Pas­cal di­rectly.

Might be­lief in be­lief oc­ca­sion­ally be valuable when over­com­ing bias? It would be bet­ter to cor­rect my be­liefs, but some­times those be­liefs come from bias. I might be con­vinced in my head that stand­ing on the glass floor of an air­plane and look­ing down is to­tally safe—this spe­cially-mod­ified-for-cool-views air­plane has flown hun­dreds of flights—yet in my heart deeply be­lieve that if I step onto it I will fall through. I might then choose to “be­lieve in the be­lief that it is safe to take a step”, while all my in­stinc­tual re­ac­tions are based on a false model. The cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance is due to my in­abil­ity to in­te­grate some­thing so for­eign to the evolu­tion­ary en­vi­ron­ment into my be­lief struc­ture.

X: There’s some­thing that makes be­liv­ing and knowl­edge quite differ­ent, and that’s truth which isn’t in­side one per­son head but out there, in re­al­ity. I’m sure that if we ask this man if he knows there is a dragon in the garage he will re­ply af­fir­ma­tively, no doubt about it, but the truth is that there is no dragon and he just think he knows is in there. But the man doesn’t know any­thing, he be­lieve a lie and he is mak­ing ex­cuses to pro­tect the lie, and one of those ex­cuses is that he knows is in there, is not a be­lief.

I think this is one of hu­man­ity great­est weak­ness; the need to de­tach from re­al­ity and defend be­liefs that are ob­vi­ously wrong, I un­der­stand the psy­cholog­i­cal need to do so, but, in my opinion, still is a sign of weak­ness. As Eliezer said we should find joy in what is real.

I’m not dis­agree­ing with any of the con­tent above, but a note about ter­minol­ogy--

LessWrong keeps us­ing the word “ra­tio­nal­ism” to mean some­thing like “rea­son” or pos­si­bly even “sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy”. In philos­o­phy, how­ever, “ra­tio­nal­ism” is not al­lied to “em­piri­cism”, but di­a­met­ri­cally op­posed to it. What we call sci­ence was a grad­ual de­vel­op­ment, over a few cen­turies, of method­olo­gies that har­nessed the pow­ers both of ra­tio­nal­ism and em­piri­cism, which had pre­vi­ously been thought to be in­com­pat­i­ble.

But if you talk to a mod­ernist or post-mod­ernist to­day, when they use the term “ra­tio­nal”, they mean old-school Greek, Pla­tonic-Aris­totelian ra­tio­nal­ism. They, like us, think so much in this old Greek way that they may use the term “rea­son” when they mean “Aris­totelian logic”. All post-mod­ernism is based on the as­sump­tion that sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy is es­sen­tially the com­bi­na­tion of Pla­tonic essences, Aris­totelian physics, and Aris­totelian logic, which is ra­tio­nal­ism. They are com­pletely ig­no­rant of what sci­ence is and how it works. But this is partly our fault, be­cause they hear us talk­ing about sci­ence and us­ing the term “ra­tio­nal­ity” as if sci­ence were ra­tio­nal­ism!

(Inb4 some­body says Plato was a ra­tio­nal­ist and Aris­to­tle was an em­piri­cist: Really, re­ally not. Aris­to­tle couldn’t mea­sure things, and very likely couldn’t do ar­ith­metic. In any case the most im­por­tant Aris­totelian writ­ings to post-mod­ernists are the Physics, which aren’t em­piri­cal in the slight­est. No time to go into it here, though.)

This is fas­ci­nat­ing. When I look back at the thought pat­terns of my younger self, I can see so much of this be­lief-in-be­lief. De­spite be­ing raised re­li­gious, I came to an ag­nos­tic con­clu­sion at around age ten, and it ter­rified me, be­cause I very much wanted to be­lieve. To my mind, peo­ple with faith had a far greater sense of moral­ity than those with­out, and I didn’t want to fall into that lat­ter cat­e­gory.

So I pro­ceeded as if I be­lieved, and even­tu­ally came to make jus­tifi­ca­tions along the lines of ‘rit­ual X ac­com­plishes out­come Y’ where Y was some­thing psy­cholog­i­cally valuable, for ex­am­ple a sense of com­mu­nity. That made X a good idea even if I didn’t truly be­lieve the the­ol­ogy in­volved.

When I was first told I had a sec­ond-or­der re­la­tion­ship to my be­lief, I was very in­sulted. It was as if I’d defined a good per­son as a re­li­gious one, and by challeng­ing my be­lief that per­son was challeng­ing my in­trin­sic worth (de­spite the fact that they were an athe­ist them­selves and clearly thought noth­ing of the sort.) Cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tion at its finest.

It took a profound shift in my think­ing about the role of re­li­gion in moral­ity be­fore I could ac­cept that it was alright not to be­lieve. The rest fol­lowed nicely.

As for Santa Claus? I pre­tended I be­lieved (de­spite know­ing the ab­solute im­pos­si­bil­ity of it be­ing true) for three whole years. The idea that there was such a great con­spir­acy that ev­ery adult seemed to be com­plicit in re­ally wor­ried me, at six years old, and made me afraid to speak the truth. I knew they wanted me to be­lieve, so I let them think I did.

If I ever have chil­dren of my own, need­less to say, Santa will be in­tro­duced as an en­joy­able fic­tion and noth­ing more.

I also liked this es­say very much. Many times it has oc­curred to me that “There are peo­ple who may claim to be­lieve in Y, but deep down they know just as well as ev­ery­one else that Y is not true.”

I would add that our con­ver­sa­tion with the hy­po­thet­i­cal dragon claimant is not likely to get to the point where you are dis­cussing bags of flour. Be­cause by that point he will prob­a­bly be ex­tremely an­gry with you and one way or an­other the con­ver­sa­tion will be con­cluded.

As the old joke goes, “Shut up, she ex­plained.”

Ac­tu­ally I think it was Steve Sailer who pointed out that with any highly con­tro­ver­sial is­sue, there is likely to be some truth float­ing around which peo­ple do not want to face. Ar­guably it’s the same con­cept.

Blarg… okay this one is trip­ping me up. There are two parts to this com­ment. The first part is quasi-math; the other is not. It is very much a brain dump and I have not ed­ited it thor­oughly.

EDIT: I think I man­aged to get it cleared up and re­sponded with a sec­ond com­ment. FYI.

Let B(X) mean be­lief in X where be­lief is defined as a pre­dic­tor of re­al­ity so that re­al­ity con­tains event X. Us­ing “There is a dragon in my garage” as X we get:

B(“There is a dragon in my garage.”)

B(“There is not a dragon in my garage.”)

I think it is okay to write the lat­ter as:

B(~X) where X is “There is a dragon in my garage.”

So far okay and both can be ver­ified. The prob­lem comes when X is “There is an un­ver­ifi­able dragon in my garage.”

B(“There is an un­ver­ifi­able dragon in my garage.”)

B(“There is not an un­ver­ifi­able dragon in my garage.”)

Both of these are un­ver­ifi­able, but the lat­ter is okay be­cause it matches re­al­ity? As in, we see no un­ver­ifi­able dragon so the ~X is… what, the de­fault? This con­fuses me. Per­haps my no­ta­tion is wrong. Is it bet­ter to write:

B(X)

~B(X)

If B(X) is be­lief in X, B(~X) != ~B(X). This way we can throw out the un­ver­ifi­able be­lief with­out cre­at­ing a sec­ond un­ver­ifi­able be­lief. All of this makes sense to me. Am I still on track with the in­tent of the post? This im­plies that B(X) and B(~X) are equally un­ver­ifi­able when X is un­ver­ifi­able.

Next is be­lief in be­lief:

B(B(X))

Of which I think you are ar­gu­ing that B(B(X)) does not im­ply B(X). But are you also say­ing that B(X) im­plies B(B(X))? And this is how peo­ple can con­tinue to be­lieve in some­thing un­ver­ifi­able?

I feel like I am drift­ing far away from the pur­pose of this post. Where did I mis­step?

Here is my sec­ond at­tempt, this time with no math:

Carl Sa­gan used this parable to illus­trate the clas­sic moral that poor hy­pothe­ses need to do fast foot­work to avoid falsifi­ca­tion. But I tell this parable to make a differ­ent point: The claimant must have an ac­cu­rate model of the situ­a­tion some­where in his mind, be­cause he can an­ti­ci­pate, in ad­vance, ex­actly which ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults he’ll need to ex­cuse.

Would there be any ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults that he wouldn’t need to ex­cuse? Is there some form of in­vi­sio­drag­onome­ter that beeps when he goes into his garage? Would the sce­nario change any if the sub­ject was gen­uinely sur­prised when no sounds of breath­ing were heard and the oxy­gen lev­els re­mained the same and still offered up ex­cuses of inaudible and non-breath­ing? How would the typ­i­cal be­liever in atoms defend their ex­is­tence if we wan­dered into the garage and com­plained about no breath­ing sounds?

I can think of sim­ple an­swers to all of these ques­tions, but it makes me think less of the use­ful­ness of your con­clu­sion. When I think of un­ver­ifi­able be­liefs I think of ex­am­ples where peo­ple will spend their whole life look­ing for phys­i­cal proof and are con­stantly dis­ap­pointed when they do not find it. Th­ese peo­ple don’t have an ac­cu­rate model of the situ­a­tion in their mind. The ex­am­ple of in­visi­ble drag­ons still ap­plies to these peo­ple while your claim that they dodge in ad­vance does not seem to ap­ply.

So… again, I feel like I am miss­ing some key point here.

[I]f you be­lieve in be­lief, you can­not ad­mit to your­self that you only be­lieve in be­lief, be­cause it is vir­tu­ous to be­lieve, not to be­lieve in be­lief, and so if you only be­lieve in be­lief, in­stead of be­liev­ing, you are not vir­tu­ous. No­body will ad­mit to them­selves, “I don’t be­lieve the Ul­ti­mate Cos­mic Sky is blue and green, but I be­lieve I ought to be­lieve it”—not un­less they are un­usu­ally ca­pa­ble of ac­knowl­edg­ing their own lack of virtue. Peo­ple don’t be­lieve in be­lief in be­lief, they just be­lieve in be­lief.

I can think of ex­am­ples where some­one fully ad­mits that they be­lieve it would be bet­ter to be­lieve X but as hard as they try and as much as they want to, they can­not. Th­ese peo­ple are of­ten guilt rid­den and have hor­rible, con­flict­ing de­sires, but it doesn’t take much imag­i­na­tion to think of some­one who sim­ply states the be­lief in be­lief X with­out emo­tion but ad­mits to not be­liev­ing X. At least, I can hear my­self say­ing these words given the right cir­cum­stances.

Believ­ing in be­lief of be­lief seems like some­thing else en­tirely un­re­lated to drag­ons in garages or un­ver­ifi­able beleifs. This, again, makes me feel as if I am miss­ing a cru­cial piece of un­der­stand­ing through­out all of this. If I had to pot­shot at the miss­ing pieces I would aim to­ward the defi­ni­tions of be­lief. Speci­fi­cally, what you are call­ing be­liefs aside from pre­dic­tors of re­al­ity. (And even there, I do not know if I have a cor­rect trans­la­tion.)

I do not know if you have any de­sire to dis­cuss this sub­ject with me. Per­haps some­one else who knows the ma­te­rial is will­ing? I sincerely apol­o­gize if these types of re­sponses are frus­trat­ing. This is how I ask for help. If there is a bet­ter way to ask I am all ears.

Would there be any ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults that he wouldn’t need to ex­cuse?

The idea here is that if you re­ally be­lieved you had an in­visi­ble dragon in your garage, if some­body pro­poses a new test (like mea­sur­ing CO2), your re­ac­tion should be “Oh, hey! There’s a chance my dragon breathes air, and if so, this would ac­tu­ally show it’s there! Of course, if not, I’ll need to see it as less likely there’s an in­visi­ble dragon.”

If in­stead, your in­stant re­ac­tion is always to ex­pect that the CO2 test re­turns noth­ing, and to spend your first thoughts (even be­fore the test!) com­ing up with an ex­cuse why this doesn’t dis­con­firm the dragon… then the part of you that’s ac­tu­ally pre­dict­ing ex­pe­riences knows there isn’t ac­tu­ally a dragon, since it in­stantly knows that any new test for it will come up null.

Do peo­ple ac­tu­ally do that? I couldn’t think of any­one I know who would do that. I fi­nally came up with an ex­am­ple of some­one I know who has a be­lief in be­lief, but it still doesn’t trans­late into some­one who acts like you de­scribed.

I am not say­ing it is im­pos­si­ble; I’ve just never met any­one who acted like this and wasn’t blatantly ly­ing (which I am as­sum­ing dis­qual­ifies them from be­lief in be­lief).

Umm… have you met a re­li­gious per­son? As soon as you men­tion any­thing about ev­i­dence or tests, they’ll tell you why they won’t/​don’t work. Th­ese sorts of ex­cuses are es­pe­cially com­mon if you talk about test­ing the effi­cacy of prayer.

99% of the peo­ple I know are re­li­gious. This isn’t an ex­ag­ger­a­tion. I can think of 2 or 3 that aren’t. (This doesn’t count on­line in­ter­ac­tions.)

So… I guess I will just re­peat what I said ear­lier. I’ve never met any­one who acted like this and wasn’t blatantly ly­ing.

You have to re­al­ize that “ev­i­dence or tests” does not mean the same thing to them as it does to you. They have been con­di­tioned against these words. If the be­lief is some­thing as vague as, “God will show up dur­ing wor­ship.” you can­not ask the phrase, “What ev­i­dence do you have for this?” This puts them on an im­me­di­ate defen­sive be­cause they are used to jerks ask­ing the ques­tions.

This has lit­tle to do with quests for be­lief. It has more to do with the ar­gu­ments as armies con­cept. This is an im­por­tant point. Please don’t dis­miss it with­out think­ing about it.

The ap­pro­pri­ate way to ask the ques­tion is to ask for de­tails about how God is show­ing up and act en­thu­si­as­tic. “Every time? Wow! How do you know? Does this hap­pen at other wor­ship ser­vices? Has it always hap­pened here? Does he show up stronger at some than oth­ers? Which ones are the best? Does he say any­thing to you?”

If this sounds silly to you, than you aren’t get­ting it.

If you bring in an CO2 me­ter and ex­pect to find God you will be called crazy by the peo­ple who be­lieve in him. This is com­pletely differ­ent than the dragon-in-the-garage ex­am­ple.

Prayer is the best ex­am­ple were I have seen Chris­ti­ans start get­ting frus­trated. Not be­cause they are com­ing up with ex­cuses, but be­cause they don’t un­der­stand why it isn’t work­ing. The peo­ple I know ac­tu­ally ex­pect some­thing. If I were to ask them if we could see a statis­ti­cal differ­ence in a study on the effects of prayer they would an­swer, “Of course!” The prob­lem with these peo­ple is that when the re­sults come back nega­tive they will start ex­plain­ing away the num­bers. If, later, you go back and try the same trick they will just re­peat the ex­pla­na­tions they used last time.

Peo­ple who an­swer, “No.” are more likely to be pray­ing with­out think­ing it will ac­tu­ally work. They are pray­ing for re­li­gious pur­poses.

Not that I’m say­ing that re­li­gious peo­ple don’t do this. If you can provide an ex­am­ple that would be great.

Prayer is the best ex­am­ple were I have seen Chris­ti­ans start get­ting frus­trated. Not be­cause they are com­ing up with ex­cuses, but be­cause they don’t un­der­stand why it isn’t work­ing.

I have close friends who are re­li­gious, and some­thing that always struck me as both odd and tragic is how they treat their prayers vs. the prayers of oth­ers.

When some­one else laments that their prayers have not been an­swered, they re­as­sure them and en­courage them to con­tinue pray­ing.

When their own prayers are not an­swered, they get frus­trated and worry that some­how they’re failing God and that they don’t de­serve to have their prayers an­swered.

For oth­ers, they act like no ex­cuse is nec­es­sary (“God has a plan”), but for them­selves they look for one (“I’ve been lax in my faith”).

This is good ev­i­dence for the “be­lief in be­lief” the­ory, but is kind of a bum­mer to think about (How would you feel if you knew the per­son re­as­sur­ing you about your prayers ac­tu­ally had the same frus­tra­tion as you?).

What’s even more of a bum­mer is how of­ten priests/​pas­tors/​etc. get asked “Why does God talk to ev­ery­one but me?”

For oth­ers, they act like no ex­cuse is nec­es­sary (“God has a plan”), but for them­selves they look for one (“I’ve been lax in my faith”).

The ex­pla­na­tion is that they are just try­ing to make their friend feel bet­ter. You can­not make your­self feel bet­ter with the same trick be­cause you know you are se­cretly con­demn­ing your friend for be­ing lax in their faith. You could deny that, I sup­pose, but I see this more as hyp­o­crit­i­cal than any­thing else.

Also, this is sig­nifi­cantly more com­mon in cer­tain de­nom­i­na­tions than oth­ers. Some de­nom­i­na­tions have en­tire books that solely ad­dress this prob­lem.

I don’t think that the peo­ple I know are se­cretly con­demn­ing their friends for be­ing lax in their faith. It’s like they feel con­stant guilt, and don’t iden­tify their bad situ­a­tions as caused by the same things other peo­ples’ bad situ­a­tions are.

Kind of like chalk­ing some­one else’s bad be­hav­ior up to char­ac­ter flaws but your own to bad cir­cum­stances.

Your point about cer­tain de­nom­i­na­tions is well taken; my friends are al­most ex­clu­sively one.

You have to re­al­ize that “ev­i­dence or tests” does not mean the same thing to them as it does to you. They have been con­di­tioned against these words.

I use differ­ent lan­guage if I’m talk­ing to a the­ist. Usu­ally I ask some­thing like, “Do you think prayer works?” They say, “Yes.” I say, “So if there was a group of peo­ple with some dis­ease, we should ex­pect those who were prayed for to be more likely to get bet­ter, right?” The con­ver­sa­tion branches here. Either they say, “No” be­cause they know about the stud­ies that have been done, or they say, “Yes,” I men­tion the stud­ies, and they say some­thing about how you can’t put God to the test.

This is com­pletely differ­ent than the dragon-in-the-garage ex­am­ple.

No it is not. Their re­ac­tion is more emo­tion­ally charged than in the dragon ex­am­ple. The the­ists have a be­lief but an­ti­ci­pa­tions guided by not-be­lief.

Another ex­am­ple: One of my friends is study­ing to be a Catholic priest. He be­lieves in evolu­tion. Of course I couldn’t help but ask him if he thought (non-hu­man) an­i­mals went to heaven. He said no. “Ah-ha!” I thought, “The trap is set!”

Me: “So there had to be some point in evolu­tion where two hairy proto-hu­mans gave birth to a slightly less hairy hu­man. Even though they only differed from each other as much as we differ from our par­ents, the proto-hu­man par­ents didn’t have souls and the child did. If the child went to heaven, he would ask God where his par­ents went.

Friend: “Yes.”

Me: o_O

Well at least he was con­sis­tent. Later I asked him about the effi­cacy of prayer and he said it worked as long as you weren’t do­ing a test to see if it worked. How con­ve­nient.

ETA: Oh and he doesn’t think cry­on­ics will work since the soul leaves the body at death. Also he be­lieves strong AI is im­pos­si­ble.

Later I asked him about the effi­cacy of prayer and he said it worked as long as you weren’t do­ing a test to see if it worked. How con­ve­nient.

This is the best ex­am­ple I have seen yet, but I am still not con­vinced that the prob­lem is with an­ti­ci­pa­tions not be­ing guided by be­liefs. He still an­ti­ci­pates some­thing but is will­ing to amend the wrong side of the ex­per­i­ment when some­thing goes weird.

But yeah, this is a much clearer ex­am­ple. I can think of a bunch of peo­ple I know who act like this.

The rest of this com­ment is nit­pick­ing over some­thing only slightly re­lated.

I say, “So if there was a group of peo­ple with some dis­ease, we should ex­pect those who were prayed for to be more likely to get bet­ter, right?”

This sen­tence will trig­ger the con­di­tion­ing I was talk­ing about. This is the ex­act wrong way to talk to some­one about the sub­ject.

Either they say, “No” be­cause they know about the stud­ies that have been done, or they say, “Yes,” I men­tion the stud­ies, and they say some­thing about how you can’t put God to the test.

No it is not [differ­ent from the dragon ex­am­ple]. Their re­ac­tion is more emo­tion­ally charged than in the dragon ex­am­ple. The the­ists have a be­lief but an­ti­ci­pa­tions guided by not-be­lief.

Those who say “No” be­cause they know about the stud­ies are not like the dragon ex­am­ple. They would have to say no be­fore they knew about the stud­ies. And, in­cluded in “stud­ies,” this means ev­ery sin­gle failed prayer from their own life.

If you found some­one who had ab­solutely no good rea­son to doubt prayer they would ex­pect the stud­ies to show prayer works. A pre-dodge of the ex­per­i­ment is much more likely to point to pre­vi­ous en­coun­ters with ex­per­i­ments than an­ti­ci­pa­tions hooked up to not-be­liefs.

Those who say “Yes” are now amend­ing their be­lief to fit the facts. This is not like the dragon ex­am­ple.

Another ex­am­ple: One of my friends is study­ing to be a Catholic priest. He be­lieves in evolu­tion. Of course I couldn’t help but ask him if he thought (non-hu­man) an­i­mals went to heaven. He said no. “Ah-ha!” I thought, “The trap is set!”

Stop try­ing to trap peo­ple. It is petty, rude, and just makes the world worse. Most peo­ple, even the­ists, are will­ing to talk about their be­liefs if they don’t feel defen­sive. Peo­ple can smell a trap com­ing as soon as they see some­one’s face. As soon as they get defen­sive, the con­ver­sa­tion be­comes a war. This is bad.

Me: “So there had to be some point in evolu­tion where two hairy proto-hu­mans gave birth to a slightly less hairy hu­man. Even though they only differed from each other as much as we differ from our par­ents, the proto-hu­man par­ents didn’t have souls and the child did. If the child went to heaven, he would ask God where his par­ents went.

Friend: “Yes.”

Me: o_O

Really, the fact that you seem so sur­prised by this an­swer makes me think you have no idea what your friend be­lieves. When your pre­dic­tors to an­swers about tech­ni­cal ques­tions are off enough to make you go o_O you may want to start look­ing at your pre­dic­tors.

Sigh. I am sorry for jump­ing at you. I don’t re­ally have a good ex­cuse, but I am sorry any­way.

Stop try­ing to trap peo­ple. It is petty, rude, and just makes the world worse.

But it’s fun! At least it’s fun be­tween friends. Re­mem­ber that my friend got the last laugh in my trap ex­am­ple. We both know we’re not go­ing to con­vince each other, but it’s still fun to play ar­gu­ment chess.

Just to bal­ance things out, I’ll give you an ex­am­ple of a trap my friend set for me.

Friend: “If life is good and death is bad, then isn’t suicide wrong in your view?”

Me: “Umm… I guess that’s a bit of an edge case.”

On re­flec­tion, I do now won­der if it’s bet­ter to mod­ify some­one’s mind so that they are no longer suici­dal than let them kill them­selves. After all, death is a much big­ger change than a few erased mem­o­ries.

Sorry, I for­got about the differ­ence be­tween ex­plain­ing away mis­con­cep­tions about re­li­gious be­lief/​prac­tice and speak­ing in a de­scrip­tive pos­i­tive way about them. I (try to re­mem­ber to) self-cen­sor the lat­ter.

Your ob­ser­va­tion and or­thonor­mal’s ob­ser­va­tions are cor­rect: re­li­gious peo­ple of­ten ex­pect and claim that ev­i­dence for God is im­pos­si­ble. This is be­cause when they say he ex­ists, they mean ex­is­tence in a differ­ent sense than what you think of.

It’s Gould’s sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria. Phys­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ism re­jects the sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria, and I’m con­vinced that it is self-con­sis­tent in do­ing so. How­ever, du­al­ists do be­lieve in the sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria and you can­not try to in­ter­pret their be­liefs in the con­text of monism—it just comes out ridicu­lous.

Reli­gious peo­ple who have as­similated the ideas of sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria think that the re­li­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists who ex­pect there could be ev­i­dence of God, and ac­tu­ally ex­pect sci­ence to con­form to ‘true’ re­li­gious be­lief are kind of crazy.

Iron­i­cally, phys­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ists seem to have more af­finity for and fo­cus much more on the the­is­tic be­liefs of the lat­ter (crazy) group. I don’t know what frac­tion of be­liev­ers com­prise each group (I do know that the frac­tion of bible liter­al­ists in­creases sub­stan­tially as you move fur­ther south in the United States) but my im­pres­sion is that the sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria set are much more con­cerned with ra­tio­nal­ity and self-con­sis­tency, so you’re more or less ig­nor­ing the group that would listen to you and which you could have an in­ter­est­ing (albeit frus­trat­ing) con­ver­sa­tion with.

I’ll go back and read ‘be­lief in be­lief’, but I don’t think you have a good in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the peo­ple who ex­pect no ev­i­dence of God.

It’s Gould’s sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria. Phys­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ism re­jects the sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria, and I’m con­vinced that it is self-con­sis­tent in do­ing so. How­ever, du­al­ists do be­lieve in the sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria and you can­not try to in­ter­pret their be­liefs in the con­text of monism—it just comes out ridicu­lous.

It is not pos­si­ble to in­ter­pret “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” as differ­ent kinds of stuff, one “em­piri­cal” and one “non-em­piri­cal”. What they are, rather, is differ­ent rules of think­ing. For ex­am­ple, prayer can of­ten help and never hurt in in­di­vi­d­ual cases, but have no effect in the ag­gre­gate (e.g. when sur­veys are performed). There’s no con­sis­tent model that has this at­tribute, but you can have a rule for think­ing about this “sep­a­rate mag­is­terium” which says, “I’ll say that it works and doesn’t hurt in in­di­vi­d­ual cases, but when some­one tries to sur­vey the ag­gre­gate, I won’t ex­pect pos­i­tive ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults, be­cause it’s not in the mag­is­terium of things that get pos­i­tive ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults”.

For ex­am­ple, prayer can of­ten help and never hurt in in­di­vi­d­ual cases, but have no effect in the ag­gre­gate (e.g. when sur­veys are performed). There’s no con­sis­tent model that has this at­tribute,

If, in quan­tum me­chan­ics, we can say that some­thing doesn’t hap­pen un­less it’s ob­served, why can’t we say that prayer works only if it isn’t ob­served (in the ag­gre­gate)? They seem equally mys­te­ri­ous claims to me.

In­deed, cer­tain in­ter­pre­ta­tions of quan­tum me­chan­ics (for ex­am­ple, non-lo­cal ac­tion at a dis­tance) point to du­al­ism. You don’t even need to be quite so ex­otic: spon­ta­neous par­ti­cle cre­ation in a vac­uum would be ev­i­dence that X isn’t closed or com­plete. Th­ese are real and in­ter­est­ing prob­lems at the in­ter­face of sci­ence and philos­o­phy. It doesn’t min­i­mize phys­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ism to ac­knowl­edge this.

(I keep say­ing that I agree that du­al­ism is in­co­her­ent—like­wise I think that some in­ter­pre­ta­tions of quan­tum me­chan­ics and the ex­is­tence of any truly ran­dom pro­cesses would be in­co­her­ent as well for equiv­a­lent rea­sons. )

Oh yes, ‘Belief in Belief’, re­called vividly as I reread it.* I liked this post (up-voted). It’s a bit of phys­i­cal-ma­te­ri­al­ist soli­dar­ity-build­ing, an op­por­tu­nity taken to poke fun at the out-group. The ma­te­rial be­ing made fun of is taken out of con­text only to the ex­tent that ma­te­rial co­her­ent to one world-view is trans­planted with­out trans­la­tion to an­other.

As Eliezer aptly put it,

The ra­tio­nal­ist virtue of em­piri­cism is sup­posed to pre­vent us from this class of mis­take. We’re sup­posed to con­stantly ask our be­liefs which ex­pe­riences they pre­dict, make them pay rent in an­ti­ci­pa­tion.

The thing is, not ev­ery­one owns this. The out-group you’re mak­ing fun of doesn’t. The ap­peal of this view is the paradig­matic strength of phys­i­cal ma­te­ri­al­ism.

No one has men­tioned the idea of dual mag­is­te­ria as a bet­ter ex­pla­na­tion for this be­hav­ior in these com­ments un­til now: that no ev­i­dence is ex­pected for the dragon be­cause the dragon isn’t just in­visi­ble, its ex­is­tence is non-em­piri­cal.

I won­der why Chris­ti­ans say, “We be­lieve in one God,” as if that were a par­tic­u­larly strong as­ser­tion. Wouldn’t it be stronger to say, “We know one God?” What is the differ­ence be­tween be­lief and knowl­edge? It seems to me that be­liefs are usu­ally based on no data.

This is an es­pe­cially use­ful quote be­cause it high­lights how many re­li­gious groups (John’s back­ground was Calv­inist) re­al­ize their be­liefs are non-em­piri­cal and find this vir­tu­ous. That’s why they say they be­lieve in one God, rather than know of one God—faith in some­thing non-em­piri­cal isn’t just tol­er­ated, it’s what their faith is about.

* I was about to link to the post ‘Belief in Belief’ and then re­al­ized this is where I am .. these Less Wrong worm holes take some get­ting used to!

I am in oc­ca­sional con­tact with re­li­gious peo­ple, and they don’t be­have as the “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” hy­poth­e­sis would pre­dict.

For in­stance, I have heard things along the fol­low­ing lines: “I hope my son gets bet­ter.” “Well, that’s not in your hands, that’s in God’s hands.” All this said quite mat­ter-of-factly.

There is ac­tive de­nial here of some­thing that be­longs in the mag­is­terium of phys­i­cal cause and effect, and ac­tive pre­sump­tion of in­terfer­ence from the sup­pos­edly sep­a­rate mag­is­terium of faith.

Of course most of those peo­ple back down from the most rad­i­cal con­se­quences of these be­liefs, they still go see a doc­tor when the situ­a­tion war­rants—al­though I un­der­stand a sig­nifi­cant num­ber do see con­flict (or at least in­ter­ac­tion) be­tween their faith and med­i­cal in­ter­ven­tions such as or­gan trans­plants or blood trans­fu­sions.

This isn’t just an epiphe­nom­e­nal dragon, it’s a dragon whose pro­scrip­tions and pre­scrip­tions im­p­inge on peo­ple’s ma­te­rial lives.

For in­stance, I have heard things along the fol­low­ing lines: “I hope my son gets bet­ter.” “Well, that’s not in your hands, that’s in God’s hands.” All this said quite mat­ter-of-factly.

I do not think this is the best ex­am­ple you could have given, be­cause it can be in­ter­preted—and of­ten is meant as—just a ver­sion of the Seren­ity Prayer.

Much worse is when peo­ple promise to pray for you, or ad­vise you to pray, as though this will im­prove the chances of ev­ery­thing turn­ing out OK. In these cases, I try to just fo­cus on their good in­ten­tions; that they will pray for me be­cause they do care. How­ever, some­times I re­ally do get quite up­set with hav­ing to pre­tend that I’m grate­ful for and satis­fied with their prayers when per­haps I would like more sym­pa­thy and emo­tional sup­port or prag­matic help.

For in­stance, I have heard things along the fol­low­ing lines: “I hope my son gets bet­ter.” “Well, that’s not in your hands, that’s in God’s hands.” All this said quite mat­ter-of-factly.

Think of the re­la­tion be­tween the mag­is­te­ria as a one-way re­la­tion­ship. The su­per­nat­u­ral can af­fect the nat­u­ral but there is no way to move back­wards into the su­per­nat­u­ral.

This is flat wrong and doesn’t ac­cu­rately de­scribe the the­ol­ogy/​cos­mol­ogy of most the­ists, but it helps when us­ing the con­cept of mag­is­te­ria. Per­son­ally, I don’t think the term mag­is­te­ria is com­pletely use­ful in this con­text.

There is a deep prob­lem be­hind all of these things where one layer or set of be­liefs trumps an­other. In a frame­work of map/​ter­ri­tory be­liefs this makes lit­tle sense. It cer­tainly doesn’t trans­late well when talk­ing to some­one who doesn’t ad­here to a map/​ter­ri­tory frame­work.

An ex­am­ple: If you asked the per­son why God didn’t make your son get bet­ter you will get a bazillion an­swers. Like­wise, if you asked about tak­ing your son to the hos­pi­tal they will tell you that you should. Th­ese two be­liefs aren’t in con­flict in their sys­tem.

I have watched an en­tire con­gre­ga­tion pray for some­one who had can­cer. They earnestly be­lieved that their prayer was hav­ing some effect but if you asked for par­tic­u­lars you will get the bazillion an­swers. Th­ese peo­ple are not try­ing to ex­plain away a fu­ture an­swer. They have seen what ap­pears to be a bazillion differ­ent endgames for the sce­nario they are now in. That, mixed in with the crazy amount of fac­tions within Chris­tian the­olog­i­cal cir­cles, isn’t go­ing to make sense with a map/​ter­ri­tory frame­work. But they aren’t us­ing that frame­work.

The weak as­sump­tion in the dragon ex­am­ple is that the be­liever of the dragon hasn’t already tried us­ing a CO2 me­ter. Don’t un­der­es­ti­mate the amount of his­tor­i­cal ques­tions packed be­hind the con­fus­ing an­swers you get when you ask some­one to prove their dragon ex­ists.

That be­ing said, the dragon ex­am­ple does bring up a very awe­some and valid point. If I took a few of those peo­ple who were in that con­gre­ga­tion who prayed about can­cer and asked them years later about the prayee’s sta­tus… what would they say? Would they ex­pect a change in their state? Would the can­cer be gone? What do they ex­pect from the prayer? My guess is that they wouldn’t make any pre­dic­tion.

Think of the re­la­tion be­tween the mag­is­te­ria as a one-way re­la­tion­ship. The su­per­nat­u­ral can af­fect the nat­u­ral but there is no way to move back­wards into the su­per­nat­u­ral.

Then the nat­u­ral can per­ceive the su­per­nat­u­ral but not vice versa. To per­ceive some­thing is to be af­fected by it.

The real prob­lem with those who go on about sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria is that they are emit­ting words that sound im­pres­sive to them and that as­so­ci­ate vaguely to some sort of even va­guer in­tu­ition, but they are not do­ing any­thing that would trans­late into think­ing, let alone co­her­ent think­ing.

I’m sorry to be bru­tal about this, but noth­ing I have ever heard any­one say about “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” has ever been con­cep­tu­ally co­her­ent let alone con­sis­tent.

There’s just one mag­is­terium, it’s called re­al­ity; and what­ever is, is real. It’s a silly con­cept. It can­not be sal­vaged. Kill it with fire.

I grew up as a Mor­mon; they have a very differ­ent view of God than most Chris­ti­ans.

God is an “ex­alted man”, es­sen­tially a hu­man that passed through a sin­gu­lar­ity. Also, re­gard­ing spirits: “There is no such thing as im­ma­te­rial mat­ter. All spirit is mat­ter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be dis­cerned by purer eyes. We can­not see it; but when our bod­ies are puri­fied we shall see that it is all mat­ter.” Spirits are “chil­dren” of God, liter­ally progeny in some sense. Spirits are at­tached to hu­man bod­ies, live life as mor­tal be­ings, and then sep­a­rate, re­tain­ing the mem­o­ries of that time; the promise of the re­s­ur­rec­tion is a per­ma­nent fus­ing of spirit mat­ter to undy­ing bod­ies made of nor­mal mat­ter, and ex­al­ta­tion, re­served for those who prove wor­thy, is the abil­ity to cre­ate spirit be­ings. It is the spirit that is con­scious. “Eter­nity” just means “far longer than you have the abil­ity to prop­erly con­ceive of”. “Sin” means “ad­dic­tive sub­stances or be­hav­iors”.

This sort of story is pretty de­cent sci-fi for early 1800s.

Mor­mons fully ex­pect spirit mat­ter to show up in the cor­rect the­ory of physics, whether it’s dark mat­ter or su­per­sym­met­ric par­ti­cles, or what­ever.

As a mis­sion­ary, I en­couraged peo­ple to pray and ask God if the Book of Mor­mon was true; many who did so had an ex­pe­rience that was so un­usual that they took us very se­ri­ously af­ter that. Those that didn’t couldn’t be held ac­countable for not be­liev­ing us, since that kind of ex­pe­rience was up to God to provide.

I now think there are sim­pler ex­pla­na­tions for most of what I once be­lieved. It took me a long time to come to the con­clu­sion that I was wrong be­cause of the “no con­flict be­tween sci­ence and re­li­gion” tenet, and I was raised as a Mor­mon in a very lov­ing, func­tional fam­ily, and had par­tic­u­larly clever par­ents who were very good apol­o­gists, and I’m not a very good ra­tio­nal­ist yet.

The real prob­lem with those who go on about sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria is that they are emit­ting words that sound im­pres­sive to them and that as­so­ci­ate vaguely to some sort of even va­guer in­tu­ition, but they are not do­ing any­thing that would trans­late into think­ing, let alone co­her­ent think­ing.

Erm… I agree with you? I don’t think the term mag­is­te­ria is an ac­cu­rate de­scrip­tion of what they be­lieve:

This is flat wrong and doesn’t ac­cu­rately de­scribe the the­ol­ogy/​cos­mol­ogy of most the­ists, but it helps when us­ing the con­cept of mag­is­te­ria. Per­son­ally, I don’t think the term mag­is­te­ria is com­pletely use­ful in this con­text.

Then the nat­u­ral can per­ceive the su­per­nat­u­ral but not vice versa. To per­ceive some­thing is to be af­fected by it.

Blarg. This is a se­man­tic war. “Affect,” in this case has noth­ing to do with per­cep­tion. Don’t for­get that these peo­ple are not work­ing with the same frame­work. I am not try­ing to defend the frame­work or even that I am claiming it for my­self. I am only try­ing to help ex­plain some­thing.

I’m sorry to be bru­tal about this, but noth­ing I have ever heard any­one say about “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” has ever been con­cep­tu­ally co­her­ent let alone con­sis­tent.

There’s just one mag­is­terium, it’s called re­al­ity; and what­ever is, is real. It’s a silly con­cept. It can­not be sal­vaged. Kill it with fire.

Yeah, okay, I am with you. I hope I wasn’t giv­ing the im­pres­sion that I am ad­vo­cat­ing sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria. You don’t have to apol­o­gize for be­ing bru­tal; I am con­fused that it seems di­rected at me.

I think it is a use­less con­cept even then. It doesn’t make sense and doesn’t com­pute. By the time you trans­late what­ever “stu­pidity” you are de­scribing into “mag­is­terium” you (a) know enough about the stu­pidity to speak to it on its own terms and (b) aren’t re­ally talk­ing about the stu­pidity; you are talk­ing about mag­is­terium which is a bas­tardiza­tion of two be­liefs. How does that help?

Er, I am not defend­ing the idea of one-way re­la­tion­ships be­tween mag­is­te­ria. The point was meant to high­light that mag­is­te­ria is very much the wrong term.

As far as the one-way re­la­tion­ship, the term was not used to mean com­mu­ni­ca­tion, causal­ity, or any­thing else in par­tic­u­lar.

The eas­iest ex­am­ple is a write-only folder on my com­puter. I can drop a file in that folder but do not have any di­rect mea­sure­ment of its suc­cess or what hap­pens to it af­ter I drop it there. This re­la­tion­ship is “one-way” in the same way that my origi­nal state­ment was us­ing “one-way.” Like­wise, a read-only file can be opened and viewed but not mod­ified. This is also “one-way” in the same man­ner that I meant “one-way” in the origi­nal state­ment.

Both of these ex­am­ples are not one-way in the man­ner that mag­is­te­ria would de­scribe one-way.

And again, I am not try­ing to defend this view. I am merely try­ing to de­scribe why mag­is­te­ria is the wrong term.

Prayer would be an ex­am­ple of drop­ping a file into a write-only folder. We do some­thing and as­sume that some­thing hap­pens to it later. We don’t have ac­cess to what­ever hap­pens be­cause we don’t have read ac­cess.

As a spe­cific ex­am­ple of Eliezer’s larger point, prayer is a nat­u­ral at­tempt to in­fluence the su­per­nat­u­ral; so by that ac­count, prayer must be fu­tile.

This state­ment wouldn’t make any sense in the cos­mol­ogy of a typ­i­cal the­ist. That cos­mol­ogy may be com­pletely wrong but us­ing this state­ment to tell them that prayer is fu­tile would make you sound like a com­plete nut. The dis­cus­sion needs to start some­where else.

I am in oc­ca­sional con­tact with re­li­gious peo­ple, and they don’t be­have as the “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” hy­poth­e­sis would pre­dict. [...] There is ac­tive de­nial here of some­thing that be­longs, in the mag­is­terium of phys­i­cal cause and effect, and ac­tive pre­sump­tion of in­terfer­ence from the sup­pos­edly sep­a­rate mag­is­terium of faith.

In­ter­ac­tions be­tween the mag­is­te­ria are con­tra­dic­tions for you, not nec­es­sar­ily to a du­al­ist who be­lieves it all works out, some­how. (For ex­am­ple, some­how we know about the sec­ond mages­terium, and knowl­edge of it has sig­nifi­cance on our in­ter­ac­tion with the first.)

Also com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters is that each re­li­gious per­son has their own lo­ca­tion on a scale of self-con­sis­tency. I find that most re­li­gious peo­ple fall well short of self-con­sis­tent, but not as short as claiming the dragon doesn’t breath just so the CO2 de­tec­tor won’t be used.

My point in the com­ments above is that when re­li­gious peo­ple claim that there is no ev­i­dence or counter-ev­i­dence for God, it’s not as of­ten a des­per­ate mea­sure to pro­tect their be­lief, but sim­ply that their be­lief in God is not meant to be about an em­piri­cal fact like a dragon would be.

In­ter­ac­tions be­tween the mag­is­te­ria are con­tra­dic­tions for you, not nec­es­sar­ily to a du­al­ist who be­lieves it all works out, some­how.

Con­tra­dic­tions are con­tra­dic­tions. If, in gen­eral, the mag­is­te­ria don’t in­ter­act, but in some spe­cific case, they do in­ter­act, that’s a con­tra­dic­tion. It’s a model that doesn’t meet the ax­ioms. That is a mat­ter of logic. You can say “The du­al­ist as­serts that no in­ter­ac­tion is tak­ing place”, but you can’t say, “for the du­al­ist, that is not a con­tra­dic­tion”.

I’m sorry to be bru­tal about this, but noth­ing I have ever heard any­one say about “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” has ever been con­cep­tu­ally co­her­ent let alone con­sis­tent.

I challenge my­self to show you a con­cept of “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” that is con­cep­tu­ally co­her­ent and con­sis­tent. Of course it re­quires re­lax­ation of the ini­tial as­sump­tions of em­piri­cism. Should I pro­ceed, or do you already grant the con­clu­sion if I am go­ing to re­lax these as­sump­tions, to save me the trou­ble?

There is ac­tive de­nial here of some­thing that be­longs in the mag­is­terium of phys­i­cal cause and effect,

The set of re­li­gious peo­ple I’m talk­ing about don’t deny things in this mag­is­terium. They be­lieve that things in this mages­terium would never be in con­flict with their be­liefs about the sec­ond.

The per­son who is speak­ing sec­ond in this ex­change would have as­sumed that the par­ent has already done all the prag­matic things they should. It is always the case that the health of a child is out­side the par­ent’s hands to some ex­tent.

If you asked me about my son’s health, and I had cause to worry, I’d say some­thing like: “We’re ar­rang­ing the best care we can given our situ­a­tion; we’re aware there’s a limit to how much we can know about what’s the mat­ter with him, and a limit to how much we can con­trol it.”

What a phrase like “God’s will” con­veys is quite differ­ent. The mean­ing I get from it is that my efforts are fu­tile: if it is part of God’s plan that my son should die, he will, no mat­ter how much I ar­range for the best care. If it is part of God’s plan that he should live, he will live, even if all I do is feed him herbs.

Now of course, in Bayesian terms, I have no us­able pri­ors about God’s plan. I can’t ever rea­son from the ev­i­dence—my son lives or dies—back to the hy­poth­e­sis, since the hy­poth­e­sis can ex­plain ev­ery­thing. And if ev­ery­body ad­mit­ted as much, it would be ad­mis­si­ble to call this “a mat­ter of faith, dis­tinct from mat­ters of ev­i­dence”. To say that ev­ery­one is free to form what­ever bizarre be­liefs they like.

The big is­sue, the elephant in the draw­ing room, is that faith is not just a pri­vate mat­ter. There are peo­ple who do claim that they have priv­ileged in­for­ma­tion about God’s plan—that mat­ters of faith, for them, are mat­ters of ev­i­dence. And this priv­ileged ac­cess to God’s plan gives them a right to pass judg­ment on mat­ters of wor­ldly policy, for in­stance the cur­rent Pope’s re­cent procla­ma­tions on the use of con­doms to fight the AIDS epi­demic.

How is that not deny­ing things in this mag­is­terium?

If the “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” hy­poth­e­sis was ten­able, we would have no rea­son to see so many peo­ple hold cor­re­lated be­liefs about the non-phys­i­cal mag­is­terium. Each per­son would form their own pri­vate faith, and let each other per­son do the same. (The hu­mor of Pastafar­i­anism re­sides pre­cisely in the ironic way they take this for granted.)

Cor­re­lated be­liefs can only mean that the mag­is­te­ria are not sep­a­rate. To be one of the faith­ful is to claim—even in­di­rectly, by as­so­ci­a­tion—some knowl­edge that out­siders lack.

The real is­sue, when you think of it that way, isn’t faith. It’s power—poli­ti­cal power.

If the “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” hy­poth­e­sis was ten­able, we would have no rea­son to see so many peo­ple hold cor­re­lated be­liefs about the non-phys­i­cal mag­is­terium.

The cor­re­la­tion of be­liefs (dis­count­ing bible liter­al­ists, etc.) is mainly over value judge­ments rather than em­piri­cal facts. For ex­am­ple, if you dis­agree with the Pope, you prob­a­bly dis­agree with his ethics rather than any sci­en­tific state­ments he is mak­ing.

Pope Bene­dict XVI has ev­ery right to ex­press his op­po­si­tion to the use of con­doms on moral grounds, in ac­cor­dance with the offi­cial stance of the Ro­man Catholic Church. But he de­serves no cre­dence when he dis­torts sci­en­tific find­ings about the value of con­doms in slow­ing the spread of the AIDS virus.

I have no idea. My meta-ethics are in flux as a re­sult of my read­ings here.

I have de­scribed my­self as a “Rawlsian”, if that will help. It seems to me that most of our in­tu­itions about ethics are in­tu­tions about how peo­ple’s claims against each other are to be set­tled, when a con­flict arises.

I be­lieve that there are dis­cov­er­able reg­u­lar­i­ties in what agree­ments we can con­verge on, un­der a range of pro­cesses for con­ver­gence, hu­man­ity’s check­ered his­tory be­ing one such pro­cess. What con­vinced me of this was Ax­elrod’s book on co­op­er­a­tion and other read­ings in game the­ory, plus Rawls. The veil of ig­no­rance is a brilli­ant ab­strac­tion of the pro­cesses for com­ing to agree­ments.

I think the Pope is be­ing an ass when he says that con­doms would worsen the AIDS epi­demic rather than miti­gate it. I don’t know much about his per­sonal ethics. I don’t pay much at­ten­tion to Popes in gen­eral.

I most em­phat­i­cally do not be­lieve that the Pope has “ev­ery right to ex­press his op­po­si­tion to the use of con­doms on moral grounds”. Per­haps he has a right to a pri­vate opinion on the mat­ter.

But when he makes such a claim, given his in­fluence as pon­tiff, it is a fact that large num­bers of peo­ple will act in ac­cor­dance, and will suffer need­lessly as a re­sult—ei­ther by con­tract­ing the dis­ease or by re­main­ing celi­bate for no good rea­son. They are not act­ing un­der their own judge­ment: if the Pope said it was OK to wear rub­ber, they would gladly wear rub­ber.

You’ve brought up many differ­ent points in this com­ment. Am I wrong to feel pha­lanxed?

I don’t see any­thing here that has to do with the origi­nal point I was mak­ing, ex­cept pos­si­bly an ad­mis­sion that you re­fuse to con­sider the group of the­ists I was talk­ing about.

I guess the prob­lem is that we’re all talk­ing about differ­ent be­lief sets—me, you, MrHen—and with­out pin­point­ing which be­lief cul­ture we’re talk­ing about or knowl­edge of their rel­a­tive in­ci­dence, this is fruitless.

with­out pin­point­ing which be­liefs we’re talk­ing about [...], this is fruitless

Agree en­tirely (I said as much in re­sponse to MrHen’s “out­ing” post); so I wanted this to be about things I’d heard first-hand.

“Pha­lanxed” is a word I wasn’t fa­mil­iar with, but I hear your con­no­ta­tion of “mus­ter­ing many ar­gu­ments”, as in mil­i­tary muster. I’ll cop to hav­ing felt an­gry as I was writ­ing the above; that isn’t di­rected at you.

I went back to your origi­nal com­ment, the nub of which I take to be this: you tol­er­ate as self-con­sis­tent the be­lief of some groups of the­ists, on the grounds that their be­liefs have no em­piri­cal con­se­quences, and that is pre­cisely what marks these be­liefs as “faith”.

The nub of what I wanted to say is: you’re read­ing the ex­change I quoted gen­er­ously. The way I heard it, it had a differ­ent mean­ing. My un­der­stand­ing is that these women weren’t us­ing “God” as a syn­onym for “luck/​un­cer­tainty”. They were refer­ring to the per­sonal God who takes an ac­tive in­ter­est in peo­ple’s lives, which is what they’ve been taught in their churches. (This is just some­thing I over­heard while pass­ing them in the street, so I don’t know which church. But I picked this ex­am­ple to illus­trate how com­mon it is, even for an athe­ist, to hear this kind of thing.)

I have looked up Calv­inists, if that’s who you mean by “the group of the­ists” in ques­tion. Their doc­trines, such as “un­con­di­tional elec­tion”, re­fer (as best I can un­der­stand those things) to a per­sonal God too, which is ex­pected as a sub­group of Chris­ti­ans. They take the Bible to provide priv­ileged ac­cess to God’s plan.

A per­sonal God who takes an ac­tive in­ter­est in events in this world, as out­lined in the Bible, does not meet your crite­ria for tol­er­ance. It is a be­lief which has em­piri­cal con­se­quences, such as the con­dem­na­tion of ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity. It doesn’t mat­ter how “be­nign” or “mod­er­ate” these in­fer­ences are; they show up “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” as a pre­tence.

I went back to your origi­nal com­ment, the nub of which I take to be this: you tol­er­ate as self-con­sis­tent the be­lief of some groups of the­ists, on the grounds that their be­liefs have no em­piri­cal con­se­quences, and that is pre­cisely what marks these be­liefs as “faith”.

I was re­spond­ing to the idea that the­ists are in­volved in blatant dou­ble-think where they an­ti­ci­pate ways that their be­liefs can be em­piri­cally re­futed and find pre­emp­tive defenses. The idea of “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” may have been one such defense, but it is the last: once they iden­tify God as non-em­piri­cal they don’t have to worry about CO2 de­tec­tors or flour or X-ray ma­chines—ever. I think that the con­tinued in­sis­tence on think­ing of God as a crea­ture hid­den in the garage that should leave some kind of em­piri­cal trace re­veals the in­fer­en­tial dis­tance be­tween a world view which re­quires that be­liefs meet em­piri­cal stan­dards and one that does not.

You sug­gest that the “sep­a­rate mag­is­te­ria” is a pre­tense. This ap­pears to be along the lines of what Eliezer is ar­gu­ing as well; that it is a con­ve­nient ‘get out of jail free’ card. I think this is an in­ter­est­ing hy­poth­e­sis—I don’t ob­ject to it, since it makes some sense.

We base our views about re­li­gion on our per­sonal ex­pe­riences with it. I feel like I en­counter peo­ple with views much more rea­son­able than the ones de­scribed here fairly of­ten. I thought that ‘sep­a­rate mages­te­ria’ de­scribed their think­ing pretty well, since re­li­gion doesn’t effect their prag­matic, day-to-day de­ci­sions. (Mo­ral/​eth­i­cal be­hav­ior is a big ex­cep­tion of course.) I’ve en­coun­tered peo­ple who in­sist that prayers have the power to change events, but I don’t think this is a rea­son­able view.

I thought peo­ple mostly prayed to fo­cus in­ten­tions and un­load anx­iety. Some data on what peo­ple ac­tu­ally be­lieve would be ex­tremely use­ful.

I pol­led some the­ist friends who hap­pened to be on­line, ask­ing “What do you think the use­ful effects of prayer are, on you, the sub­ject on which you pray, or any­thing else?” and fol­lowup ques­tions to get clar­ifi­ca­tion/​elab­o­ra­tion.

Epis­co­palian: “The most con­crete effect of prayer is to help me calm down about stress­ful situ­a­tions. The sub­ject is gen­er­ally not di­rectly af­fected. It is my out­look that is most of­ten changed. Psy­cholog­i­cally, it helps me to let go of the cause of stress. It’s like a spiritual form of del­e­ga­tion.”

Ir­ish Catholic With Je­suit Ten­den­cies: “The Ig­na­tion spiritu­al­ity sys­tem has a lot to do with us­ing prayer to fo­cus and dis­tance your­self from the emo­tions and petty con­cerns sur­round­ing the prob­lem. Through de­tatched anal­y­sis, one can gain bet­ter per­spec­tive on the cor­rect choice. … Well, os­ten­si­bly, it’s akin to med­i­ta­tion, and other forms of calming re­flec­tion pos­si­ble in other re­li­gions. For me, though, I tend to pray, a) in times of crisis, b) in Mass, and c) for other peo­ple who I think can use what­ever karmic juju my click­ing of prover­bial chicken lips can muster.” (On be­ing asked whether the “karmic juju” af­fects the peo­ple prayed for:) “It’s one of those things. “I think I can, I think I can.”″ (I said: “So it helps you help them?”) “I guess. Often, there’s lit­tle else you can do for folks.”

Mor­mon: “Well, I think it de­pends on the need of the per­son in­volved and the abil­ity of that per­son to take care of him/​her­self. I have heard sto­ries from peo­ple I trust where mirac­u­lous things have oc­cured as the re­sult of prayer. But I find that, for me per­son­ally, prayer gives me com­fort, courage, and some­times, through prayer, my thoughts are ori­ented in ways that al­low me to see a prob­lem from an an­gle I couldn’t be­fore and there­fore solve it. Is it benefi­cial? Yes. Is it di­v­ine in­ter­ven­tion? Hard to say. Even if it’s just some­one feel­ing more pos­i­tive as a re­sult of a prayer, I think it’s a benefit—par­tic­u­larly for the sick. Pos­i­tive at­ti­tudes seem to help a lot there.”

This was a sam­ple of friends of an athe­is­tic philoso­pher who were an­swer­ing a ques­tion by that same philoso­pher. The sam­ple, un­for­tu­nately, tells me al­most noth­ing about the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion.

Thank you, Ali­corn. It’s very helpful to have any data. Even data from peo­ple that are ed­u­cated and com­fortable with athe­ism, like my­self, is bet­ter than athe­ists just spec­u­lat­ing about what the­ists think.

I’ve en­coun­tered peo­ple who in­sist that prayers have the power to change events, but I don’t think this is a rea­son­able view.

Believ­ing in a spe­cific God (who, for ex­am­ple, promises to an­swer prayers) is an un­rea­son­able view. Believ­ing in the same God but also be­liev­ing that prayers are un­able to change events is even more un­rea­son­able. It’s just more prac­ti­cal.

I’m go­ing to test the effi­cacy of “prayer”… on­line com­mu­ni­ca­tion with other minds. I would like at least 30 karma for this com­ment. If I get this much karma, it will ver­ify the effi­cacy of this kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. If I get less than that, I guess it will show that this kind of “prayer” isn’t effi­ca­cious.

Of course, it could just show that peo­ple don’t always do what you want them to do, es­pe­cially when you ex­plic­itly ad­mit that you are test­ing them.

Just as a com­pletely non-re­li­gious ex­am­ple, my girlfriend is a med­i­cal so­cial worker and has been work­ing re­cently with a pa­tient that is ab­solutely con­vinced he has can­cer.

There has ap­par­ently been some cases of tests that came back clean, and his ex­cuses af­ter the fact, but it’s also turned in to him an­ti­ci­pat­ing fu­ture tests not find­ing the can­cer, yet with him still cer­tain he has can­cer. I had origi­nally sug­gested that she ask him ahead of time some­thing like, “well if we do this test and it comes back clean, will you let it go?” but he wasn’t even open to the ques­tion.

Should I con­tinue this con­ver­sa­tion? Is there any­thing to be had or learned here? The in­ter­net is a tricky place and it could be my mood tonight, but I feel that this seems to be headed down a volatile path. I don’t mind talk­ing about it but I will get tired of deal­ing with com­ments that aren’t mak­ing much of an effort to do some quick think­ing on their own.

The im­pli­ca­tion in this is more that this is a stupid, dead horse, ar­gu­ment cir­cle that ev­ery­one has been around a few times. The im­pli­ca­tion is not that you aren’t think­ing or that you should be writ­ing small es­says on prayer. This is just a big rab­bit hole and I get the feel­ing that no one re­ally wants to go there again.

Talk­ing any­way...

If I asked any Chris­tian I know if they prayed for a brand new car in their drive­way to­mor­row morn­ing they would prob­a­bly give an an­swer like, “Well, it could hap­pen, but it’s not very likely.” I don’t see this as dodg­ing ex­per­i­men­tal ev­i­dence be­fore the test has hap­pened. More than likely they already tried some­thing like that when they were kids and it ob­vi­ously failed.

My ex­pec­ta­tion of the ex­per­i­ments on in­ter­ces­sory prayer is that it would do about as well as a placebo. (I am guess­ing we are talk­ing about prayer for health is­sues.) Per­haps a lit­tle bet­ter than place­bos, but I don’t know the pos­i­tive af­fects of vis­i­tors on pa­tients. For some rea­son, I as­sume that be­ing stuck alone in a hos­pi­tal is bad for the av­er­age per­son’s mood which would prob­a­bly af­fect their re­cov­ery. What I would find more tel­ling is the af­fect of prayer with­out the pa­tient hear­ing about it. In this case, I would ex­pect no sig­nifi­cant differ­ence.

But I still ask God for stuff. It makes me feel bet­ter and it helps me think about the stuff as a prob­lem to solve. It is a way for me to ac­knowl­edge that stuff. “God” could be re­placed by a differ­ent term, and if I re­ject Theism it prob­a­bly will be, but for now prayer has a use. I don’t see it the same way ev­ery­one sees it, but even in the case of a Tra­di­tional Chris­tian, I don’t think it is a good ex­am­ple of some­one mak­ing up ex­cuses for an in­visi­ble dragon be­fore the ex­per­i­ment hap­pens.

As much as I be­lieve in the power of peo­ple to de­lude and lie to them­selves, this is a hard stretch for me. Again, I am not say­ing its im­pos­si­ble. I just haven’t seen it. It could be all around me, I sup­pose, but I still don’t see it.

I think that you are in­ter­pret­ing your re­li­gious fel­lows with too much char­ity. Some of them might be like you. Others won’t be, un­less you’re hang­ing out with an ex­clu­sively Uni­tar­ian crowd.

Yeah, I see ev­ery­one with char­ity. I rarely run into truly stupid peo­ple. Most of them have stupid be­liefs and stupid habits but they are in­tel­li­gent enough to still be al­ive. Th­ese peo­ple are smart enough to un­der­stand the con­cepts at LessWrong. At least, smart enough to un­der­stand ev­ery­thing I have read so far. Maybe not the mathy par­tic­u­lars, but the high level con­cepts, sure.

The as­trologer in your ex­am­ple is not stupid. He dodges be­cause he already knows it will fail be­cause he has seen it fail. I sus­pect he latches onto his be­lief for other rea­sons. I re­ally don’t see how he could be fol­low­ing as­trol­ogy and not see it fail from time to time. The ap­pro­pri­ate ques­tion isn’t in the form of an ex­per­i­ment be­cause you don’t know what the be­liever ex­pects.

I get that this is be­lief in be­lief. What I don’t get is how this matches the dragon ex­am­ple. He isn’t dodg­ing an ex­per­i­ment that he hasn’t seen yet. He sees it all the time. Try­ing to ver­ify the ac­cu­racy of as­trol­ogy is some­thing these peo­ple do ev­ery day. You can watch in the same video as peo­ple pon­der if a say­ing ap­plies to them. Half of them re­ject it with­out feel­ing like their whole sys­tem crashed.

I am not defend­ing as­trol­ogy. I am not defend­ing the be­liefs in it. I am con­fused as to how this looks like the dragon ex­am­ple.

The clos­est dragon-es­que ex­am­ple I have seen posted here was this:

Later I asked him about the effi­cacy of prayer and he said it worked as long as you weren’t do­ing a test to see if it worked.

I think I found an ex­am­ple of Belief in Belief that makes sense to me. The other day I met some­one and they talked about how World War 3 would take place by next Oc­to­ber. They didn’t re­ally go into de­tails, and I didn’t press for de­tails, but the ba­sic source of rea­son­ing was the Book of Reve­la­tions.

If I had pressed for in­for­ma­tion I am sure all sorts of soft rea­sons would be pro­duced about the cur­rent state of in­ter­na­tional af­fairs and blah, blah, blah. If I asked if Amer­ica would be in­vaded and if there would be ter­rible de­struc­tion the an­swer would prob­a­bly be, “Yes.” Yet I am pos­i­tive that they are do­ing noth­ing to pre­pare for in­va­sion and won’t be sur­prised in the slight­est when Oc­to­ber rolls around with no World War. World War 3 will still be hap­pen­ing “soon” and “soon” is still 18 months out. There won’t be any change in be­hav­ior, no wor­ries about the botched pre­dic­tion, no won­der­ing if per­haps the Book of Reve­la­tions isn’t the best source ma­te­rial.

This is cer­tainly a Belief in Belief. They re­ally do think they be­lieve it. If I asked them if they be­lieved in an Oc­to­ber ’11 WW3, they would say, “Yes.” But there is no con­vic­tion and no ac­tion as a re­sult of this be­lief. So… do they re­ally be­lieve?

I don’t have faith—if I did, I’d have no qualms what­so­ever about facts and ar­gu­ments pre­sented by athe­ists. I wouldn’t be ner­vously claiming that the dragon is in­visi­ble. (Some peo­ple who think the apoc­a­lypse is nigh ac­tu­ally do stock­pile canned food. That’s faith; they be­lieve in Reve­la­tions the same way I be­lieve in physics.) I don’t have faith, be­cause I’m ac­tu­ally fright­ened that some ar­chae­ol­o­gist will find ev­i­dence that there wasn’t any Ex­o­dus, for in­stance. And the fear is re­ally that chang­ing my re­li­gious be­liefs will make me a worse per­son. Less grate­ful? Less rev­er­ent? Less re­spect­ful? That’s the ba­sic idea but I’m not sure if those words con­vey it.

To give a non-re­li­gious anal­ogy, take the ques­tion of whether men have evolved to be ir­re­spon­si­ble fathers. That’s an em­piri­cal ques­tion. But a man can be afraid of be­liev­ing that he is, in­deed, biolog­i­cally de­signed to be an ir­re­spon­si­ble father, be­cause he fears that such a be­lief will make him ac­tu­ally treat his chil­dren poorly. A ra­tio­nal man, we’d hope, would de­cide “I’ll be a good father, what­ever the evolu­tion­ary biol­o­gists say.” But he can only do that if he has some in­de­pen­dent rea­son to be a good father, and if he’s aware he does.

A re­li­gious per­son wants to be a good per­son, and wants to have the right sort of at­ti­tude to the world. But all his rea­sons and mo­ti­va­tions come from God. He could fear not be­liev­ing in God be­cause he fears not be­ing good. Pre­sum­ably, he has some other, non-God mo­ti­va­tions for want­ing to be good; but let’s say that he doesn’t know what they are. Then his fear might be jus­tified. With no God and no prin­ci­ples, his be­hav­ior might ac­tu­ally change.

If I may ex­tend your hy­po­thet­i­cal fright­ened father metaphor: the man is wor­ried that he is biolog­i­cally de­signed to be an ir­re­spon­si­ble father, but he is mis­taken to worry that he will find out that he is biolog­i­cally de­signed to be ir­re­spon­si­ble. What he wants is to be re­spon­si­ble, not to think that he is re­spon­si­ble, so the mere fact of whether or not he knows some spe­cific fact is not go­ing to af­fect that.

What­ever the truth is, the hy­po­thet­i­cal fright­ened father—and the very real fright­ened the­ists, such as your­self—already are liv­ing un­der what­ever con­di­tions ac­tu­ally hold. If the father is a re­spon­si­ble one, he already wins, what­ever his biolog­i­cal pre­dis­po­si­tion was. If a the­ist is a good per­son, that the­ist already is a good per­son, whether God is real or not.

That is the first of two es­sen­tial points. The sec­ond is this: if you would rather be good than not, then you are already on the right path, even if you can’t see where you are go­ing. Others have walked this way be­fore, and es­caped into clear air.

I think it ac­tu­ally comes down to the same log­i­cal idea of The Bot­tom Line, the modus tol­lens: if the bot­tom line is formed through good pro­cesses, then it of­ten re­mains strong even when the text above it is cre­ated through other means. You (or, I sup­pose, I) could write an es­say on all the cases where it is what was writ­ten above the bot­tom line that was garbage.

But I like this point:

What­ever the truth is, the hy­po­thet­i­cal fright­ened father—and the very real fright­ened the­ists, such as your­self—already are liv­ing un­der what­ever con­di­tions ac­tu­ally hold.

It oc­curred to me that noth­ing I ac­tu­ally re­vere could ob­ject to me re­spond­ing to the ev­i­dence of my eyes and mind. I can’t help do­ing that. It can’t pos­si­bly be blame­wor­thy.

I don’t feel that I’m los­ing any­thing right now. What I always took se­ri­ously was a sense of jus­tice or truth. Not just mine, you un­der­stand, and maybe not a bunch of pla­tonic forms out in the Ea­gle Ne­bula ei­ther, but some­thing worth tak­ing se­ri­ously. A lit­tle white light. That’s what I was afraid would go away. But I don’t think it will, now, and all the rest is just win­dow dress­ing. Maybe I can even pay bet­ter at­ten­tion to it with­out the win­dow dress­ing.

I couldn’t be­lieve I’d ever be happy like this, and maybe I’ll see my er­ror soon enough… for so long this was some­thing I promised my­self I’d never do, a failure of will. But right now this seems … bet­ter. Ac­tu­ally bet­ter. Less phony. Truer to what I ac­tu­ally did re­vere all along.

Would you say that you were ex­pend­ing a lot of effort try­ing to be­lieve things when it didn’t feel nat­u­ral to be­lieve them, and now you feel happy be­cause that bur­den is lifted? Are there any other (what are the rea­sons) for the hap­piness?

Yes!
It’s that. It’s also that I’m start­ing to think it’s not so ter­rible; that I’m not a traitor to any­thing worth my loy­alty.

Also. For a long, long time I felt that God had given up on me… that any de­ity would have long ago de­cided I was no good and put me in the re­ject file. God’s love was an un­known, but it seemed very, very un­likely. A more cheer­ful thought—but not, I think, a false one—is that there is no dis­tance be­tween Jus­tice and the Judge. If I do right, there’s no ad­di­tional ques­tion, “But is it good enough for God?” I’ve done right. If I learn from my mis­takes and make resti­tu­tion, there’s no ad­di­tional “But will God for­give me?” If I’ve paid my debts, then I’ve paid my debts.

All I have to do is do jus­tice, love mercy, and walk humbly with re­al­ity. Sud­denly this seems fea­si­ble as it never did be­fore.

Just cu­ri­ous, based on your phras­ing I would guess that you’re Jewish, and pos­si­bly or­tho­dox (there is some prece­dent for that here). I pushed the big un­sub­scribe but­ton in the sky two month ago my­self and have gone through some of the same emo­tions.

Fol­lowed your re­cent post here and thought I’d add my sup­port as well. I went through some­thing very similar last Christ­mas (some of that story HERE) and it’s more or less on­go­ing. I re­ally love how you’ve put things, es­pe­cially these:

It oc­curred to me that noth­ing I ac­tu­ally re­vere could ob­ject to me re­spond­ing to the ev­i­dence of my eyes and mind.

If I do right, there’s no ad­di­tional ques­tion, “But is it good enough for God?” I’ve done right. If I learn from my mis­takes and make resti­tu­tion, there’s no ad­di­tional “But will God for­give me?” If I’ve paid my debts, then I’ve paid my debts.

Well, my is­sue is that peo­ple act based on their be­liefs. A father will do things for his chil­dren be­cause he thinks he can, and thinks he should. If he reads an ar­ti­cle in Psy­chol­ogy To­day and doesn’t see the point any more, be­cause ba­boon fathers don’t raise chil­dren, well, then, his be­hav­ior is likely to change.

The worst case sce­nario is be­liev­ing in­cor­rectly that it’s okay to do wrong. Believ­ing in­cor­rectly that it’s wrong to do some­thing okay is not as bad; you’re mis­taken, but you’re not de­struc­tive. The loss-averse strat­egy is to be very sus­pi­cious of claims that tell you “Re­lax, don’t worry, it’s all right to do X.”

A father will do things for his chil­dren be­cause he thinks he can, and thinks he should. If he reads an ar­ti­cle in Psy­chol­ogy To­day and doesn’t see the point any more, be­cause ba­boon fathers don’t raise chil­dren, well, then, his be­hav­ior is likely to change.

A lit­tle knowl­edge is a dan­ger­ous thing. The solu­tion to this dilemma is to learn more. It re­ally isn’t so bad on the other side if you just keep walk­ing and don’t look down.

But all his rea­sons and mo­ti­va­tions come from God. He could fear not be­liev­ing in God be­cause he fears not be­ing good.

That’s why a lot of athe­ist or­gani­sa­tions ex­ist that pro­mote ideas like “you can be good with­out God”. If peo­ple can get over the be­lief that moral­ity flows only from God, there aren’t so many wor­ries about peo­ple act­ing worse for not be­ing re­li­gious.

It’s kindof silly re­ally. Socrates did a re­duc­tio on Div­ine Com­mand The­ory in the Euthy­phro, and the Catholic Church has re­jected it for re­lated rea­sons for a long time now.

A re­li­gious per­son wants to be a good per­son, and wants to have the right sort of at­ti­tude to the world. But all his rea­sons and mo­ti­va­tions come from God. He could fear not be­liev­ing in God be­cause he fears not be­ing good. Pre­sum­ably, he has some other, non-God mo­ti­va­tions for want­ing to be good; but let’s say that he doesn’t know what they are.

Se­ri­ously, if there were no moral­ity, I would still have tastes, and they would still in­volve be­ing fairly nice to peo­ple, but I’d gen­er­ally put my­self first and not worry about it. I’d some­times be a freeloader or slacker, but not to such ex­tremes that I could see how my ac­tions hurt other peo­ple. I’d gen­er­ally be a pro­duc­tive, sym­pa­thetic per­son, but not ter­ribly heroic or al­tru­is­tic. I would … not be much differ­ent from the way I am now. But with­out the guilt. Without the sense that that can’t pos­si­bly be enough.

For some of us, ‘ethics’ (here read as equiv­a­lent to ‘moral­ity’) is an an­swer to the ques­tion “What should I do (or want)?”, which is equiv­a­lent to “What do I have most rea­son to do (or want)?”. If you care about the an­swers to ques­tions like “Should I or­der a ham­burger or a hot dog?” and “Should I drink this bot­tle of drain cleaner?” and “Should I put my­self first?” then you care about ethics.

If I offer you a bot­tle of drain cleaner to drink and you re­fuse it, and I ask you, “What rea­son did you have for re­fus­ing it?” and you give me any an­swer, then you’re not an eth­i­cal nihilist; you think there is some­thing to eth­i­cal ques­tions.

Of course, some would not cast such a broad net in their defi­ni­tion of ‘ethics’, but I don’t tend to find such the­o­ries of ethics very use­ful.

yet you have not proven (or ex­am­ined) that X is prop­erly (and only) di­vid­able into X, ~X for all cases of “X”
for prac­tice: “this sen­tence is not true”. is eas­ily cor­rect, if one re­al­ises that it -as­sumes- that the only pos­si­ble val­ues of the sen­tence are cov­ered by X OR ~X. (ie the B(X)= TRUE || B(~X)=FALSE).
When one re­al­ises that “a square cir­cle” looks ex­actly like ‘a square cir­cle’, and thus can be “real” then one starts to un­der­stand the a pri­ori as­sump­tions one has cre­ated when look­ing at con­di­tions tested by B(X) and B(~X) as proof tests.

Mr. Hen, As I un­der­stand your no­ta­tion, B(B(X)) would mean “I be­lieve that I be­lieve X”. Lem­mon’s fourth ax­iom for dox­as­tic modal logic is B(X) im­plies B(B(X)). This is some­times called the pos­i­tive in­tro­spec­tion ax­iom. I’m pretty sure it ap­plies in any rea­son­able the­ory of “ra­tio­nal­ity”

But this is ap­par­ently not what the post says that “Belief in be­lief” is. In this thread, “Belief in be­lief” seems to be some­thing like “I ought to be­lieve X, there­fore I want to be­lieve X, there­fore I will my­self to be­lieve X, and I be­lieve that I have suc­ceeded, there­fore I be­lieve that I be­lieve X (even though an ob­jec­tive ob­server can see that I don’t re­ally be­lieve X deep down)” This kind of be­lief in be­lief is ir­ra­tional.

I be­lieve that I be­lieve that such a no­table philoso­pher as Den­nett has not com­pletely messed up the mean­ing of the word “be­lief” in his zeal to de­p­re­cate the con­tinued ex­is­tence of non-athe­ists.

I be­lieve the differ­ence be­tween be­lief and knowl­edge stems from ex­pe­rience. Knowl­edge is ac­cepted as proven data, whether from the ex­pe­rience of oth­ers or through your own di­rect ex­pe­rience. Beliefs are ac­cepted as some­thing proven to vary­ing lev­els of per­sonal satis­fac­tion in­ferred di­rectly from ex­pe­rience, de­pen­dent upon the per­son and the be­lief.

This makes the two rather in­ter­de­pen­dent in my view, for how can one know with­out be­liev­ing that his knowl­edge is truth and how can one be­lieve with­out know­ing some­thing to be­lieve in?

In the case of mod­ern re­li­gion, peo­ple take the be­lief oth­ers ex­press as knowl­edge and use it as a ba­sis for their own be­liefs.

I knew as soon as I read the first para­graph that the com­ments would start dis­cussing re­li­gion, haha...

John Rozen­daal, I never re­ally thought about the “We know”/​”We be­lieve” dis­tinc­tion be­fore. Seems to me like the church con­di­tions peo­ple to think of their ideals as a be­lief, so that the thought of ‘knowl­edge’ wont creep into their minds and make them think. Think­ing is the church’s worst en­emy.

How does this com­pare with Pop­per’s the­ory? In the in­stance above, it’s clear that be­lief in be­lief doesn’t make sense. But things may not be as clear. Won’t an event with low prob­a­bil­ity look like the in­visi­ble dragon be­fore it hap­pens?

It doesn’t seem to me that this post ac­tu­ally makes any co­her­ent ar­gu­ment. It spends a fair amount of words us­ing seem­ingly meta­phys­i­cal terms with­out ac­tu­ally say­ing any­thing. But that’s not even the im­por­tant thing.

Is this post sup­posed to in­crease my hap­piness or lifes­pan, or even that of some­one else?

Well, for one, “be­liefs in be­liefs” are em­bod­ied in pat­terns of neu­rons in hu­man brains–they’re a real phe­nomenon, not a “meta­phys­i­cal” one, and they can in­fluence peo­ples’ thoughts, words, and ac­tions. Some­one who ev­ery week donates money to their their church, be­cause they go to a church, be­cause they “be­lieve in God”, may not re­ally be­lief in God in the sense of not let­ting it de­ter­mine any im­por­tant de­ci­sion. But the be­lief is still there, float­ing around in­ter­act­ing with the rest of their value sys­tem, com­bin­ing with so­cial pres­sure, pul­ling their per­sonal opinions over to­wards the be­liefs en­dorsed by that church, and of course cost­ing them $x money ev­ery week, which, based on how churches usu­ally spend money, is prob­a­bly mostly spent on in­stal­ling the be­lief in be­lief in God into other peo­ples’ heads. On an in­di­vi­d­ual level, it’s hard to eval­u­ate whether that per­son is more or less happy or will live longer, but on a so­cietal level, there are definite effects.

I also liked this es­say very much. Many times it has oc­curred to me that “There are peo­ple who may claim to be­lieve in Y, but deep down they know just as well as ev­ery­one else that Y is not true.”

I would add that our con­ver­sa­tion with the hy­po­thet­i­cal dragon claimant is not likely to get to the point where you are dis­cussing bags of flour. Be­cause by that point he will prob­a­bly be ex­tremely an­gry with you and one way or an­other the con­ver­sa­tion will be con­cluded.

As the old joke goes, “Shut up, she ex­plained.”

Ac­tu­ally I think it was Steve Sailer who pointed out that with any highly con­tro­ver­sial is­sue, there is likely to be some truth float­ing around which peo­ple do not want to face. Ar­guably it’s the same con­cept.

I’ve got a dou­ble garage… what if the dragon sneaks out one door while I’m com­ing in through the other door, then comes in be­hind me through the sec­ond door while I look for it out­side the first door?? Dragons ev­ery­where now!!

As if the hu­man brain only had enough disk space to rep­re­sent one be­lief at a time!

If you think of be­lief as some­thing like “rep­re­sent­ing the world as be­ing a cer­tain way”, then a be­lief in Real Beliefs might have fol­lowed from profound ig­no­rance of neur­si­cence. But there are plenty of other ways of get­ting there. For in­stance, if one thinks of be­lief as ex­palan­ing ac­tions, then the Real Belief is the one at­tested by ac­tion. Some­one who does not giove to char­ity does ot Really Believe in chaity even if they say they do. Ac­tions ei­ther oc­cur or do not: one can­not perform con­tra­dic­tory ac­tions , so one can­not en­ter­tain con­tra­dic­tory Real Beliefs. For rea­sons that have noth­ing to do with the num­ber of neu­rons in the brain.

Yet again, a Philoso­phers are Idiots claim turns out to be poorly founded.

Eliezer, my un­der­stand­ing is: “be­lief is to be­lieve in some­thing”.

Whether you call it sci­ence fic­tion, heuris­tics, over­com­ing bias, his­tory, a be­lief is a be­lief.
You can’t prove be­lief as it’s self-sub­jec­tive.
You can’t tell some­one what they feel is wrong.
Each in­di­vi­d­ual has there equa­tion when it comes to un­der­stand­ing the “dragon” within them­self.
If drag­ons can’t be ver­ified as they have never been ver­ified based on his­tory, why do peo­ple still feel the need to be­lieve in drag­ons and con­tinue to dis­cuss the sub­ject and be fas­ci­nated by it?